Constructive architecture compliance checking — an experiment on support by live feedback

Knodel, Jens; Muthig, Dirk; Rost, Dominik

doi:10.1109/icsm.2008.4658077

Cited by 24 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Eichberg et al [49] concentrated on the performance of the (real-time) algorithm employed. Knodel et al [48] evaluated it on M.Sc. students and Mattsson [11] evaluated a Model Driven Development approach to the problem.…”

Section: Empirical Assessment Of Rm Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Real-Time Reflexion Modelling in architecture reconciliation: A multi case study

Buckley

Alí

English

et al. 2015

Information and Software Technology

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ContextReflexion Modelling is considered one of the more successful approaches to architecture reconciliation. Empirical studies strongly suggest that professional developers involved in real-life industrial projects find the information provided by variants of this approach useful and insightful, but the degree to which it resolves architecture conformance issues is still unclear. ObjectiveThis paper aims to assess the level of architecture conformance achieved by professional architects using Reflexion Modelling, and to determine how the approach could be extended to improve its suitability for this task. MethodAn in-vivo, multi-case-study protocol was adopted across five software systems, from four different financial services organizations. Think-aloud, video-tape and interview data from professional architects involved in Reflexion Modelling sessions were analysed qualitatively. ResultsThis study showed that (at least) four months after the Reflexion Modelling sessions less than 50% of the architectural violations identified were removed. The majority of participants who did remove violations favoured changes to the architectural model rather than to the code. Participants seemed to work off two specific architectural templates, and interactively explored their architectural model to focus in on the causes of violations, and to assess the ramifications of potential code changes. They expressed a desire for dependency analysis beyond static-source-code analysis and scalable visualizations. ConclusionThe findings support several interesting usage-in-practice traits, previously hinted at in the literature. These include 1) the iterative analysis of systems through Reflexion models, as a precursor to possible code change or as a focusing mechanism to identify the location of architecture conformance issues, 2) the extension of the approach with respect to dependency analysis of software systems and architectural modelling templates, 3) improved visualization support and 4) the insight that identification of architectural violations in itself does not lead to their removal in the majority of instances.

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Section: Empirical Assessment Of Rm Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To further increase conformance, several groups [47][48][49] have proposed more timely violation detection in RM. For example, developers could be made aware of the violations they introduce with respect to the as-intended architecture as they code, via margin alerts at compile time and code assist [34].…”

Section: Reflexion Modellingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Real-Time Reflexion Modelling in architecture reconciliation: A multi case study

Buckley

Alí

English

et al. 2015

Information and Software Technology

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“…Architectural conformance is the process that checks to which degree the concrete architecture (e.g., the source code implementation) is consistent with the planned one [KMR08]. Architectural conformance can be static (i.e., without executing the target system) or dynamic (i.e., executing the target system).…”

Section: Architectural Conformance and Visualizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Architecture Conformance Checking in Dynamically Typed Languages.

Miranda¹,

Rodrigues²,

Valente³

et al. 2016

JOT

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Architectural erosion is a recurrent problem faced by software architects, which might be even more severe in systems implemented in dynamically typed languages. The reasons are twofold: (i) some features provided by such languages make developers more propitious to break the planned architecture (e.g., dynamic invocations and buildings), and (ii) the developers' community lacks tool support for monitoring the implemented architecture. To address these shortcomings, this paper presents an architectural conformance and visualization approach based on static code analysis techniques and on a lightweight type propagation heuristic. The central idea is to provide the developers' community with means to control the architectural erosion process by reporting architectural violations and visualizing them in high-level architectural models, such as reflexion models and DSMs. This paper also describes a tool-called ArchRuby-that implements our approach. We evaluate our solution in three real-world systems identifying 48 architectural violations of which the developers had no prior knowledge. We also measure the effectiveness of our type propagation heuristic reporting that (i) the number of analyzed types raises 5% on the average and (ii) certain violations are only detected due to our heuristic.

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“…Knodel et al [6] introduced the concept of constructive conformance verification in reflexion models, i.e., instant feedback is given to developers related to architectural violations. The results indicated the developers inserted 60% less architectural violations when utilizing the approach.…”

Section: Empirical Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some studies indicate that divergences between source code and the planned architecture can occur in the beginning stages of the development process [4,6]. Other studies present scenarios where software source code, during its evolution, gradually loses its adherence to the architecture; this phenomenon is known as software architecture erosion [7][8][9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

DCL 2.0: modular and reusable specification of architectural constraints

et al. 2017

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Background: Due to the abstract nature of software architecture concepts, ensuring the correct implementation of architectural decisions is not a trivial task. Divergences between the planned architecture and source code may occur in the early stages of the software development, which denotes a phenomenon known as software architecture erosion. Architectural conformance checking techniques have been proposed to tackle the problem of divergences between the planned architecture and source code. Among such techniques, we can note the DCL (dependency constraint language), which is a domain-specific language that has interesting results in architectural conformance contexts. However, the current version of DCL has some limitations, such as lack of modularity and low degree of reuse, which may prevent its adoption in real software development scenarios. In this article, we extend DCL with a reusable, modular, and hierarchical specification. Method: We propose and evaluate DCL 2.0-an extension of the original DCL-and its tool in a real-world development scenario of a large system used by a government branch of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Result: We were able to detect 771 architectural violations where 74% of them could only be detected due to the new violation types proposed in DCL 2.0. Conclusion: By using DCL 2.0 herein presented, it was possible to conclude the following: (i) DCL 2.0 proved importance in helping the development team consistently address violations, and (ii) after using DCL 2.0 for months, the number of architectural violations being committed into the system branches was reduced to zero. Therefore, we argue that DCL 2.0 can have a positive impact on the architectural conformance of systems.

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Constructive architecture compliance checking — an experiment on support by live feedback

Cited by 24 publications

References 17 publications

Real-Time Reflexion Modelling in architecture reconciliation: A multi case study

Real-Time Reflexion Modelling in architecture reconciliation: A multi case study

Architecture Conformance Checking in Dynamically Typed Languages.

DCL 2.0: modular and reusable specification of architectural constraints

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