2009.09.15 | Henrik Bærbak Christensen

A Tool for Conformance Checking Architectural Styles.

Abstract:

A common reason for an IT project to fail is architectural violations. Architectural
violations is when an architect has developed a software architecture
but the implementation does not follow the architecture designed. In the
area of Software Architecture Conformance Checking we address this problem
by checking a representation of the architecture against the implementation.
We focus on architectural styles. Architectural styles are interesting
since they are widely used but there is no standard of how a specific style
should be implemented.
We present a prototype tool for checking architectural styles. It alerts
the developer of errors while developing. The tool is fully integrated with
the Eclipse IDE; potential errors are therefor reported to the developer.
We evaluate the prototype tool on two open source applications, one of
them contains conformance errors which the tool is able to detect and alert
the user of. Our dissertation contributes with groundwork that will hopefully
be exploited by future work to develop a standard tool in the toolbox
of developers.
The prototype tool supports two architectural styles: client/server- and
layered architecture. SK: 5211