Assisting the synchronization of UCM-based architectural documentation with implementation

Abstract

A key aspect of architecture-centric development is the traceability of design documentation. In particular, architects should be always aware of the relationships between the architectural model "as documented" and its corresponding implementation model. The problem is that these two models usually diverge from each other over time, due to factors such as new requirements, refactorings, etc. Therefore, tool assistance is very important to assess the level of conformance between architectural documentation and implementation. In this paper, we present a tool approach called ArchSync that helps architects to conciliate architectural documentation expressed through Use-Case Maps with Java source code, as modifications are being made on the code. ArchSync relies on a heuristic that incrementally detects inconsistencies with respect to the architectural prescriptions, based on the analysis of system execution traces. ArchSync can also give suggestions for re-synchronization. Results of two case-studies showing the applicability of the approach are reported.

Detection and Repair of Architectural Inconsistencies in Java

“…A series of approaches detect inconsistencies between architecture and implementation by reverse engineering the descriptive architecture from the code and comparing it with the prescriptive architecture [51,48,69,52,66,11,71,56,24,57,37,18,36,32]. Murphy et al…”

User Requirements Notation: The First Ten Years, The Next Ten Years (Invited Paper)

“…More recently, Díaz-Pace et al [66] presented an approach called ArchSync (supported by an Eclipsebased UCM tool with the same name and initially developed by Blech) that helps architects synchronize architectural documentation expressed through UCM with Java source code, as modifications are being made on the code. Execution traces are used as an input, and inconsistencies with the architectural UCM model are then highlighted.…”

“…jUCMNav is for the moment the only tool that supports both goal and scenario modeling and analysis. As discussed earlier, other tools with partial and specialized support for UCM also exist: Störmer's Architecture Explorer for architecture recovery activities [179] and ArchSync for the documentation, maintenance and diagnosis of applications written in Java [66].…”