Session:Architecture Compliance--Paper Preview

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Assessing a Multi-Site Development Organization for Architectural Compliance

Viktor Clerc, Patricia Lago, Hans van Vliet

Multi-site development organizations require coordination and communication efforts between different sites to ensure successful distributed development. These efforts need to be guided by a set of principles and statements on the software architecture that must be complied with throughout the organization: architectural rules. It is of paramount importance that multi-site development organizations incorporate measures in the architecting process to secure compliance with these rules throughout the organization. We describe a method to assess the degree to which compliance measures are secured in multi-site development organizations. We share our experience in applying this method in a large development organization in the consumer electronics domain.

Constructing a Reading Guide for Software Product Audits

Remco de Boer, Hans van Vliet

Architectural knowledge is reflected in various artifacts of a software product. In the case of a software product audit this architectural knowledge needs to be uncovered and its effects assessed, in order to evaluate the quality of the software product. A particular problem is to find and comprehend the architectural knowledge that resides in the software product documentation. The amount of documents, and the differences in for instance target audience and level of abstraction, make it a difficult job for the auditors to find their way through the documentation. This paper discusses how the use of a technique called Latent Semantic Analysis can guide the auditors through the documentation to the architectural knowledge they need. Using Latent Semantic Analysis, we effectively construct a reading guide for software product audits.

A Comparison of Static Architecture Compliance Checking Approaches

Jens Knodel, Daniel Popescu

The software architecture is one of the most important artifacts created in the lifecycle of a software system. It enables, facilitates, hampers, or interferes directly the achievement of business goals, functional and quality requirements. One instrument to determine how adequate the architecture is for its intended usage is architecture compliance checking. This paper compares three static architecture compliance checking approaches (reflexion models, relation conformance rules, and component access rules) by assessing their applicability in 13 distinct dimensions. The results give guidance on when to use which approach.
Keywords: access rules, architecture compliance checking, architecture evaluation, conformance rules, SAVE, software architecture, static analysis.