On Identifying Architectural Smells in Search-based Product Line Designs

OPLA-Tool-ASP: a Tool to Prevent Architectural Smells in Search-based Product Line Architecture Design

“…Perissato et al [35] carried out an exploratory investigation about the presence of architectural smells in a set of PLA designs obtained using OPLA-Tool. The results revealed that OPLA-Tool adversely introduces some ar-chitectural smells in resulting designs.…”

“…Furthermore, it does not detect and remove the architectural smells existing in the original design given as input for the tool. Perissato et al [35] also identified the most common architectural smells detected in the alternative design generated by OPLA-Tool and proposed guidelines to detect and prevent those architectural smells. However, such guidelines were not applied and validated.…”

“…Particularly, some quality attributes -e.g., reusability and maintainability -are extremely important to SPL Engineering [25]. However, there is not any approach to neither detect architectural smells nor prevent their introduction in PLA design optimized by search-based approaches [35]. In this sense, it is worth investigating the presence of architectural smells in automatically generated PLA designs in order to avoid severe smells are present in the initial design of a SPL.…”

“…For doing so, in this work we present a tool named OPLA-Tool-ASP (Optimization for PLA Tool -Architectural Smells Prevention). This tool is an evolution of OPLA-Tool that incorporates Perissato et alťs guidelines [35] to prevent architectural smells in PLA design automatically generated, particularly those ones that arise in the module view of the architectural design. OPLA-Tool-ASP detects and prevents four smells that are the most frequent in the design instances investigated in [35]: Unused Interface [18], Unused Brick [18], Concern Overload [18] and Link Overload [18].…”

“…This tool is an evolution of OPLA-Tool that incorporates Perissato et alťs guidelines [35] to prevent architectural smells in PLA design automatically generated, particularly those ones that arise in the module view of the architectural design. OPLA-Tool-ASP detects and prevents four smells that are the most frequent in the design instances investigated in [35]: Unused Interface [18], Unused Brick [18], Concern Overload [18] and Link Overload [18]. It is important to prevent Unused Interface and Unused Brick smells because they are the architectural smells adversely introduced by OPLA-Tool in alternative designs.…”