Jooj: Real-Time Support For Avoiding Cyclic Dependencies

The design guideline avoid dependency cycles among modules was first alluded to by Parnas in 1978. Many tools have since been built to detect cyclic dependencies among a program’s organisational units, yet we still see real applications riddled with large dependency cycles. Our solution to this problem is to proactively check for dependency cycles as a developer writes code. In this way a cycle can be identified and eliminated the moment any fragment of code is written that induces one. This approach is analogous to a well-known manufacturing quality assurance technique known as poka-yoke. We demonstrate the feasibility our ‘real-time checking’ approach via an Eclipse plugin we have built