Detecting Architecture Erosion by Design Decision of Architectural Pattern

In the software architecture design, architects usually adopt many classic architectural patterns. However, such important design decisions often fail to be effectively captured in practice. The problem called “architecture erosion” may happen easily. During the design iterations, the latest design may accidentally violate the constraints implied by existing architectural patterns. During the evolution of system, the improper modification may conflict with the original design. In this paper, we present an approach for detecting architecture erosion, by capturing the most important design decisions about the adopted architectural patterns. Architects can use a collection of predefined and frequently-used architectural patterns in their design. Our supporting tool can capture what and how the architectural patterns are used, and then generate a set of corresponding OCL code automatically. With these specifications, we can both verify the architecture in design phase and validate the run-time architecture to detect architecture erosion. Finally, we use an illustrative example to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. keywords: architectural pattern, architecture erosion, design decision