Ten virtues of structured graphs

Abstract

This paper extends the invited talk by the first author about the virtues of structured graphs. The motivation behind the talk and this paper relies on our experience on the development of ADR, a formal approach for the design of style-conformant, reconfigurable software systems. ADR is based on hierarchical graphs with interfaces and it has been conceived in the attempt of reconciling software architectures and process calculi by means of graphical methods. We have tried to write an ADR agnostic paper where we raise some drawbacks of flat, unstructured graphs for the design and analysis of software systems and we argue that hierarchical, structured graphs can alleviate such drawbacks.