Blending and reusing rules for architectural degradation prevention

Abstract

As software systems are maintained, their architecture often degrades through the processes of architectural drift and erosion. These processes are often intertwined and the same modules in the code become the locus of both drift and erosion symptoms. Thus, architects should elaborate architecture rules for detecting occurrences of both degradation symptoms. While the specification of such rules is time-consuming, they are similar across software projects adhering to similar architecture decompositions. Unfortunately, existing anti-degradation techniques are limited as they focus only on detecting either drift or erosion symptoms. They also do not support the reuse of recurring anti-degradation rules. In this context, the contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it presents TamDera, a domain-specific language for: (i) specifying rule-based strategies to detect both erosion and drift symptoms, and (ii) promoting the hierarchical and compositional reuse of design rules across multiple projects. The language was designed with usual concepts from programming languages in mind such as, inheritance and modularization. Second, we evaluated to what extent developers would benefit from the definition and reuse of hybrid rules. Our study involved 21 versions pertaining to 5 software projects, and more than 600 rules. On average 45% of classes that had drift symptoms in first versions presented interrelated erosion problems in latter versions or vice-versa. Also, up to 72% of all the TamDera rules in a project are from a predefined library of reusable rules. They were responsible for detecting on average of 73% of the inter-related degradation symptoms across the projects.

Evaluating an Architecture Conformance Monitoring Solution

“…This feature was used to briefly summarize the intent of the rules, suggest possible fixing strategies and point users to more detailed reference pages hosted on the project website. 10 https://github.com/mamuz/PhpDependencyAnalysis During our evaluation we were also asked to make results actionable. In fact, in C1 and C2, we were able to detect cyclic or otherwise unwanted dependencies between packages but we neglected to provide useful information on how to remove them.…”

“…Some of these solutions offer additional complementary features. Some allow the definition of rules through a textual DSL [9], [10]. Others contributed new visual representations that support the reverse engineering of large systems [11].…”

Mining architectural violations from version history

“…Moreover, the architecture of a software often includes the relationships, constraints, principles, and guidelines that should guide its design and evolution over time [Garlan, 2000, Garlan and Shaw, 1996, Fowler, 2002. Components are usually defined as architectural entities which encapsulate a subset of the system's functionalities [Gurgel et al, 2014].…”

“…This plug-in checks whether the source code is in accordance with the constraints defined in DCL. Gurgel et al [Gurgel et al, 2014] proposed a conformance technique that, similarly to the DCL language, provides mechanisms to explicitly define the planned architecture of a system, describing their components and dependency constraints. Their approach assumes that similar degradation evidences occur in software projects.…”

“…Formal concept analysis can be a promising technique for mining architectural violations by highlighting dependency relationships between classes of a system, including use and disuse of relations. [Terra and Valente, 2009] and Tamdera [Gurgel et al, 2014] Architectural conformance checking [Hou and Hoover, 2006], FCL [Hou et al, 2004], and LogEn [Eichberg et al, 2008] Architectural conformance checking…”