Enforcing structural regularities in software using IntensiVE

The design and implementation of a software system is often governed by many different coding conventions, design patterns, architectural design rules, and other so-called structural regularities. To prevent a deterioration of the system’s source code, it is important that these regularities are verified and enforced in subsequent evolutions of the system. The Intensional Views Environment (IntensiVE), presented in this article, is a tool suite for documenting such structural regularities in (object-oriented) software systems and verifying their consistency in later versions of those systems.