Supporting Software Evolution by Integrating DSL-based Architectural Abstraction and Understandability Related Metrics

Abstract

Software architecture erosion and architectural drift are well known software evolution problems. While there exist a number of approaches to address these problems, so far in these approaches the understandability of the resulting architectural models (e.g., component models) is seldom studied. However, reduced understandability of the architectural models might lead to problems similar to architecture erosion and architectural drift. To address this problem, we propose to extend our existing DSL-based architecture abstraction approach with empirically evaluated understandability metrics. While the DSL-based architecture abstraction approach enables software architects to keep source code and architecture consistent, the understandability metrics extensions enables them, while working with the DSL, to continuously judge the understandability of the architectural component models they create with the DSL. We studied the applicability of our approach in a case study of an existing open source system.