As the number of software applications including the widespread of real-time and em- bedded systems are constantly increasing and tend to grow in complexity, the architecture tends to decay over the years, leading to the occurrence of a spectrum of defects and bad smells (i.e., instances of architectural decay) that are manifested and sustained over time in a software system’s life cycle. Thus, the implemented system is not compliant to the specified architecture and such architectural decay becomes an increasing challenge for the developers. We propose a set of constructive architecture views at different levels of granularity, which monitor and ensure that the modifications made by developers at the implementation level are in compliance with those of the different architectural timed-event elements of real-time systems. Thus, we investigated a set of orthogonal architectural de- cay paradigms timed-event component decay, timed-event interface decay, timed-event connector decay and timed-event port decay. All of this has led to predicting, forecasting, and detecting architectural decay with a greater degree of structure, abstraction techniques, architecture reconstruction; and hence offered a series of potential effectiveness and enhancement in gaining a deeper understanding of implementation-level bad smells in real-time systems. Furthermore, to support this research towards an effective architectural decay prediction and detection geared towards real-time and embedded systems, we investigated and evaluated the effect of our approach through a real-time Internet of Things (IoT) case study.

Microservices have recently emerged as an architectural style that gained widespread popularity in industries. Not long time ago, software applications were designed monolith- ically, that is all components were woven together as one single executable artifact unit sharing the resources of the same machine. In this paper, we look at microservice architec- tures through evolutionary lenses as it does not capture the essence of a new software move- ment. Microservices offer a new trend in software architecture and deliver a set of benefits and best practices. However, this is by no means without their own share of challenges and problems that are self-inflicted or inherited from its predecessors (i.e., component-based software architecture (CBSA), service-oriented architecture, (SOA), and service-oriented computing (SOC). The evolution of these different paradigms and their gradual interweav- ing have fostered the development of microservices afterwards. We introduce two finite state-based formalisms called, monitoring microservice automata (MMA) and container microservice automata (CMA). The former is a powerful and parallel formalism to model microservices’ infrastructures, including monitoring microservices’ functionalities, resource usage, compositions, and interface operations. The later models each microservice func- tionality independently as an automaton that accounts for local behavior that contains a microservice and its code. Such as code is required to run within an isolated environment and a system which is fully supported by MMA. As another phase of the evolution of ag- ile software development, microservice architectures have made their footprints in several industries such as Amazon, Twiter, PayPal, LinkedIn, Netflix, and SoundCloud.