On Adequate Behavior-Based Architecture Conformance Checks

Abstract

Architecture conformance checks are important to control the inevitable drift between the prescriptive and descriptive architectures of a software system during its evolution. To this end, behavior-based architecture conformance checks should be employed in addition to static ones. But behavior-based analyses suffer from an important shortcoming: their results depend on the adequateness of the monitored behavior. Our claim is that a behavior-based architecture conformance check is adequate if (1) the architectural rules relevant from a behavior viewpoint are expressible and can be checked against and (2) the set of captured scenarios are relevant for exhibiting the overall behavior of the system. First, using ARAMIS, our approach to behavior-based architecture reconstruction and conformance checking, we exemplify how conformance rules can be expressed. Then, we propose a metric to investigate the relevance of the monitored scenarios. Last we present two case studies, in which we defined and checked communication rules and discuss the relevance of the monitored scenarios.