s4rdm3x: A Tool Suite to Explore Code to Architecture Mapping Techniques
Tobias Olsson, Morgan Ericsson, Anna Wingkvist · The Journal of Open Source Software · 2021
Architectural drift and erosion, where the implementation starts to deviate from the intended software architecture or the rules set by it, are common problems in long-lived software systems.This can be avoided by using techniques, such as Reflexion modeling (Murphy et al., 1995), to validate that the implementation conforms to the indented architecture.Unfortunately, such techniques require a mapping from source code modules (e.g., classes) to elements of the architecture, something that is not always available or up to date.This is a known problem when, e.g., companies want to adopt static architecture conformance checking; the effort to manually create or bring this mapping up to date is just too time-consuming and error-prone (Ali et al., 2017;Bittencourt et al., 2010).