TY - GEN
T1 - An industrial case study of architecture conformance
AU - Rosik, Jacek
AU - Le Gear, Andrew
AU - Babar, Muhammad Ali
AU - Buckley, Jim
PY - 2008
Y1 - 2008
N2 - A software designer often has little control over, or means of checking, whether his design is being adhered to, once the implementation begins. This 'architectural drift', where the original design of the system and the as-implemented design of the system diverge, can cause serious problems for evolution, maintenance and the comprehensibility of a system if it remains undocumented or uncorrected. The earlier such discrepancies can be identified, the better. This paper reports on a case study designed to evaluate a proposed approach for monitoring architectural drift during software development. The proposed approach differs significantly from existing design conformance approaches in that it has been designed for application within a forward engineering context. The findings show the utility of the approach in identifying architectural drift but also illustrate a number of improvements that could be made to the technique to further promote architecture conformance.
AB - A software designer often has little control over, or means of checking, whether his design is being adhered to, once the implementation begins. This 'architectural drift', where the original design of the system and the as-implemented design of the system diverge, can cause serious problems for evolution, maintenance and the comprehensibility of a system if it remains undocumented or uncorrected. The earlier such discrepancies can be identified, the better. This paper reports on a case study designed to evaluate a proposed approach for monitoring architectural drift during software development. The proposed approach differs significantly from existing design conformance approaches in that it has been designed for application within a forward engineering context. The findings show the utility of the approach in identifying architectural drift but also illustrate a number of improvements that could be made to the technique to further promote architecture conformance.
KW - Design
KW - Human factors
KW - Verification
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=62949096934&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/1414004.1414019
DO - 10.1145/1414004.1414019
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:62949096934
SN - 9781595939715
T3 - ESEM'08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
SP - 80
EP - 89
BT - ESEM'08
T2 - 2nd International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, ESEM 2008
Y2 - 9 October 2008 through 10 October 2008
ER -