Software Architecture Health Monitor.withCopyright

In this paper, we first discuss the concept of architecture debt and how this debt grows in virtually every software-intensive project. Next we propose a methodology for developers to monitor the health of a project’s architecture through an analysis of the development artifacts that a project produces. Our objective is to monitor and manage architecture debt by leveraging an architecture model that we proposed recently, called the Design Rule Space (DRSpace). We use DRSpaces to split a complex system into smaller subsystems based on features, patterns, refactoring targets, etc., so that we can monitor and analyze the evolution and interaction of each subsystem separately. We also employ a recently proposed architectural metric—Decoupling Level—to quantitatively monitor changes in a project’s overall level of architecture maintainability. Using these tools, we describe our vision for a software architecture “health monitor”, on analogy with a health monitor used in a hospital, to continuously monitor the health of the “patient” and alert staff to any potential danger signs.