Automated Architecture Consistency Checking for Model Driven Software Development

When software projects evolve their actual implementation and their intended architecture may drift apart resulting in problems for further maintenance. As a countermeasure it is good software engineering practice to check the implementation against the architectural description for consistency. In this work we check software developed by a Model Driven Software Development (MDSD) process. This allows us to completely automate consistency checking by deducing information from implementation, design documents, and model transformations. We have applied our approach on a Java project and found several inconsistencies hinting at design problems. With our approach we can find inconsistencies early, keep the artifacts of an MDSD process consistent, and, thus, improve the maintainability and understandability of the software.

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