SAPlugin: Management and Extraction of Software Architecture Descriptions in Visual Paradigm
Laurens Sion, Dimitri Van Landuyt, Koen Yskout, Wouter Joosen · 2025
The design and documentation of software architectures involves substantial and non-trivial modeling effort, especially when relying on multiple complementary views that have to accurately and consistently depict complementary architectural concerns. This problem is exacerbated for novices that are getting acquainted with the distinction between models and views and lack tool support to enforce correspondences between complementary views. To address this need, we developed a Visual Paradigm plugin, called SAPlugin, that uses the API of this modeling tool to analyze the architecture and provide feedback. The SAPlugin provides support to (1) analyze the architecture for problems in modeling conventions and consistency, and diagram consistencies, (2) warn for missing documentation, (3) restructure the project and its model according a set of conventions, and (4) generate architectural documentation in PDF. Having adopted the SAPlugin in a Software Architecture master's course over eight subsequent years, we reflect on and evaluate its effects and merits. We specifically observe that the use of the SAPlugin has greatly reduced the effort for architectural documentation creation and substantially reduced the issues of inconsistency and architectural correspondence. Finally, we highlight the potential of leveraging the created technology as an enabler for more extensive empirical studies on the architecture decision-making process.