Runtime verification for dynamic architectures

Abstract

The architecture of a system captures important design decisions for the system. Over time, changes in a system's implementation may lead to violations of specific design decisions. This problem is common in industry and known as architectural erosion. Since it may have severe consequences on the quality of a system, research has focused on the development of tools and techniques to address the presented problem. As of today, most of the approaches to detect architectural erosion employ static analysis techniques. While these techniques are well-suited for the analysis of static architectures, they reach their limit when it comes to dynamic architectures. Thus, in this paper, we propose an alternative approach based on runtime verification: We describe techniques to formally specify constraints for dynamic architectures and algorithms to translate such specifications to instrumentation code and corresponding monitors. The approach is implemented in Eclipse/EMF, demonstrated through a running example, and evaluated using two case studies.