Architecture Enforcement Concerns and Activities - An Expert Study

Software architecture provides the high-level design of software systems with the most critical decisions. The source code of a system has to conform to the architectural decisions to guarantee the systems’ success in terms of quality properties. Therefore, architects have to continuously ensure that architecture decisions are implemented correctly to prevent architecture erosion. This is the main goal of Architecture Enforcement. For an effective enforcement, architects have to be aware of the most important enforcement concerns and activities. Unfortunately, current state of the art does not provide a concrete structure on how the process of architecture enforcement is actually applied in industry. Therefore, we conducted an empirical study in order to gain insight in the industrial practice of architecture enforcement. For this, we interviewed 12 experienced software architects from different companies. As a result, we identified the most important concerns that software architects care about during architecture enforcement. Additionally, we investigated which activities architects usually apply in order to enforce those concerns.