Static Conformance Checking of Runtime Architectural Structure

It is hard to statically check a system’s conformance to its runtime architectural structure. Previous approaches address the code architecture, change the language radically, mandate implementation frameworks, or use dynamic analyses that cannot check all possible program runs. We propose a static approach that supports existing object-oriented implementations, but relies on program annotations to encode architectural intent. We statically extract a hierarchical view of the runtime object graph from the annotated program and map it into an as-built runtime architecture. We then check and measure the structural conformance of the as-built and the as-designed architectures. An evaluation on several systems showed that the approach can identify interesting structural nonconformities.