Mining architectural violations from version history

作者：Maffort Cristiano^*; Valente Marco Tulio; Terra Ricardo; Bigonha Mariza; Anquetil Nicolas; Hora Andre

来源：Empirical Software Engineering, 2016, 21(3): 854-895.

DOI：10.1007/s10664-014-9348-2

• Software architecture conformance
• Software architecture erosion
• Mining software repositories
• Reflexion models

Software architecture conformance is a key software quality control activity that aims to reveal the progressive gap normally observed between concrete and planned software architectures. However, formally specifying an architecture can be difficult, as it must be done by an expert of the system having a high level understanding of it. In this paper, we present a lightweighted approach for architecture conformance based on a combination of static and historical source code analysis. The proposed approach relies on four heuristics for detecting absences (something expected was not found) and divergences (something prohibited was found) in source code based architectures. We also present an architecture conformance process based on the proposed approach. We followed this process to evaluate the architecture of two industrial-strength information systems, achieving an overall precision of 62.7 % and 53.8 %. We also evaluated our approach in an open-source information retrieval library, achieving an overall precision of 59.2 %. We envision that an heuristicbased approach for architecture conformance can be used to rapidly raise architectural warnings, without deeply involving experts in the process.

• 出版日期2016-6