Modelling and Verifying Smell-Free Architectures with the Archery Language

Abstract

Architectural (bad) smells are design decisions found in software architectures that degrade the ability of systems to evolve. This paper presents an approach to verify that a software architecture is smellfree using the Archery architectural description language. The language provides a core for modelling software architectures and an extension for specifying constraints. The approach consists in precisely specifying architectural smells as constraints, and then verifying that software architectures do not satisfy any of them. The constraint language is based on a propositional modal logic with recursion that includes: a converse operator for relations among architectural concepts, graded modalities for describing the cardinality in such relations, and nominals referencing architectural elements. Four architectural smells illustrate the approach.

The μTOSCA toolchain: Mining, analyzing, and refactoring microservice‐based architectures

“…We instead focus on identifying and resolving the architectural smells due to the interaction occurring among the multiple components structuring a microservice-based application. To some extent, the solutions by Garcia et al, 55 Sanchez et al, 56 Arcelli et al, 57 Fontana et al, 49 and Vidal et al 58 are complementary to ours: By exploiting both such solutions and ours, one could indeed identify and resolve both the smells due to the internals of a service and those due to the interactions occurring among the components structuring a microservice-based application.…”

“…It is also worth relating our solution for identifying and resolving architectural smells in microservice‐based applications with existing solutions for detecting smells in classical services. Garcia et al 55 and Sanchez et al 56 present two different approaches to automatically detect smells in the design of a single service (specified in UML and Archery, respectively). Arcelli et al, 57 Fontana et al, 49 and Vidal et al 58 propose three different for identifying smells in the sources of a service and for refactoring such sources to resolve the identified smells.…”

Using Software Architecture Descriptions to Detect Architectural Smells at Design Time

“…[ Sanchez et al 2015] proposed an approach to verify the nonexistence of architectural smells from architecture descriptions in Archery, a formal ADL proposed by them. In their approach, the structure of software architectures is represented in Archery.…”

Analysing and Deploying (Micro)service-Based Applications

“…[70] and [143] instead present solutions for detecting smells in the design of a single service (specified in UML and ARCHERY, respectively). [9], [67] and [159] focus on identifying smells in the structuring of the sources of a service, and propose refactorings for resolving detected smells.…”