Architectural clones
Daniel E. Krutz, Mehdi Mirakhorl · 2016
Architectural tactics are the building blocks of software architecture. They describe solutions for addressing specific quality concerns, and are prevalent across many software systems. Once a decision is made to utilize a tactic, the developer must generate a concrete plan for implementing the tactic in the code. Unfortunately, this is a non-trivial task for even experienced developers. Developers often resort to using search engines, crowd-sourcing websites, or discussion forums to find sample code snippets. A robust Tactic Search Engine can replace this manual, internet-based search process and help developers to reuse proper architectural knowledge and accurately implement tactics and patterns from a wide range of open source systems. In this paper we analyze several implementations of architectural tactics in the open source community and identify the foundation for building a practical Tactic Search Engine. We also introduce the concept of tactical-clones which may be used as the basic element of a tactic search engine.