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Preserving architectural decisions through architectural patterns

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Abstract

Architectural decisions have emerged as a means to maintain the quality of the architecture during its evolution. One of the most important decisions made by architects are those about the design approach such as the use of patterns or styles in the architecture. The structural nature of this type of decisions give them the potential to be controlled systematically. In the literature, there are some works on the automation of architectural decision violation checking. In this paper we show that these works do not allow to detect all possible architectural decision violations. To solve this problem we propose an approach which: (i) describes architectural patterns that hold the architectural decision definition, (ii) integrates architectural decisions into an architectural model and, (iii) automates the architectural decision conformance checking. The approach is implemented using Eclipse modeling framework and its accompanying technologies. Starting from well-known architectural patterns, we show that we can formalize all those related to the structural aspect. Through two evaluations, we show that our approach can be adapted to different architecture paradigms and allows to detect more violations comparing to the existing approaches.

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Notes

  1. SCA is a model created by a group of industrial partners to support building applications and systems using SOA solution.

  2. Upperbound = \(-\)1 indicates that there’s no limited upper threshold for a multiplicity.

  3. http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/gmp/.

  4. The reader can find these meta-models at the same website of ADManager tool.

  5. https://www-archware.irisa.fr/files/2014/05/IRISAArchWare-2013-TR-021.pdf.

  6. We use the Sets.powerSet method in Guava library.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IRISA, Universite de Bretagne Sud, Vannes, France

    Minh Tu Ton That, Salah Sadou, Flavio Oquendo & Régis Fleurquin

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  1. Minh Tu Ton That
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  2. Salah Sadou
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  3. Flavio Oquendo
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Correspondence to Minh Tu Ton That.

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Ton That, M.T., Sadou, S., Oquendo, F. et al. Preserving architectural decisions through architectural patterns. Autom Softw Eng 23, 427–467 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10515-014-0172-0

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