Towards controlling software architecture erosion through runtime conformance monitoring

Abstract

The software architecture of a system is often used to guide and constrain its implementation. While the code structure of an initial implementation is likely to conform to its intended architecture, its dynamic properties cannot always be fully checked until deployment. Routine maintenance and changing requirements can also lead to a deployed system deviating from this architecture over time. Dynamic architecture conformance checking plays an important part in ensuring that software architectures and corresponding implementations stay consistent with one another throughout the software lifecycle. However, runtime conformance checking strategies often force changes to the software, demand tight coupling between the monitoring framework and application, impact performance, require manual intervention, and lack flexibility and extensibility, affecting their viability in practice. This thesis presents a dynamic conformance checking framework called PANDArch framework, which aims to address these issues. PANDArch is designed to be automated, pluggable, non-intrusive, performance-centric, extensible and tolerant of incomplete specifications. The thesis describes the concept and design principles behind PANDArch, and its current implementation, which uses an architecture description language to specify architectures and Java as the target language. The framework is evaluated using three open source software products of different types. The results suggest that dynamic architectural conformance checking with the proposed features may be a viable option in practice.