Law-Governed Regularities in Object Systems. Part 1: An Abstract Model

Regularities, or the conformity to unifying principles, are essential to the comprehensibility, manageability and reliability of large software systems. Yet, as is argued in this paper, the inherent globality of regularities makes them very hard to establish in traditional methods. This paper explores an approach to regularities for object systems which greatly simplifies their implementation, making them more easily employable for taming of the complexities of large scale software. This approach, which is based on a generalized concept of law-governed architecture (LGA) introduced in this paper, provides system designers and builders with the means for establishing a fairly wide range of useful regularities simply by declaring them formally and explicitly as the law of the system. Once such a law-governed regularity is declared, it is enforced by the environment in which the system is developed. keywords: Complexity in software, regularities, object-systems, software-development environments. 1Work supported in part by NSF grant No. CCR-9308773.