Automated Detection of Likely Design Flaws in Layered Architectures

• Main Authors: BUDI, Aditya, Lucia, -, LO, David, JIANG, Lingxiao, WANG, Shaowei
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2011
• Subjects: Automated detection; Layered architecture; Non-trivial; Software project; Software Engineering; Systems Architecture
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1399; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/2398/viewcontent/JiangL2011258_Aditya_Budi.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Layered architecture prescribes a good principle for separating concerns to make systems more maintainable. One example of such layered architectures is the separation of classes into three groups: Boundary, Control, and Entity, which are referred to as the three analysis class stereotypes in UML. Classes of different stereotypes are interacting with one another, when properly designed, the overall interaction would be maintainable, flexible, and robust. On the other hand, poor design would result in less maintainable system that is prone to errors. In many software projects, the stereotypes of classes are often missing, thus detection of design flaws becomes non-trivial. In this paper, we provide a framework that automatically labels classes as Boundary, Control, or Entity, and detects design flaws of the rules associated with each stereotype. Our evaluation with programs developed by both novice and expert developers show that our technique is able to detect many design flaws accurately.