SC 12 - Software Architecture Conformance and Recovery

Ricardo Terra (UFMG)
Marco Tulio Valente (UFMG)

Friday, October 1, 2010 (14:00-17:30)

Abstract:

The goal of software architecture is to describe the main components of a software system and to define acceptable interactions between such components. Therefore, the architectural definition of a system involves a set of design decisions that are crucial to its success and that cannot be easily changed in subsequent phases of the implementation. However, despite its crucial importance, architectural components and abstractions do not have an explicit representation in the source code. As a result, during the implementation and evolution of a system, it is common to observe divergences between its concrete (i.e. source-code base) and planned architecture. More important, such divergences are usually not detected, documented or communicated to software architects and project managers, leading to the phenomenon known as architectural erosion. This short course provides an overview about the state-of-the-practice techniques and tools to support architecture conformance and recovery. In common, these techniques aim to extract architectural representations from the source code of a system, therefore allowing software architects to detect and stop architecture erosion.

Lecturers:

• Ricardo Terra is a PhD student at UFMG. He holds a master degree in Informatics at PUC Minas. He worked for five year as software architect in companies like DBA, Synos, and Stefanini. Nowadays, he is also a lecturer at Fumec University.

• Marco Tulio Valente is an assistant professor at DCC/UFMG. His research interests include software architecture, aspect-oriented programming, software product lines, and middleware. He holds a PhD? degree in Computer Science from Federal University of Minas Gerais.