Design Principles in Architectural Evolution: a Case Study

We wish to investigate how structural design principles are used in practice, in order to assess the utility and relevance of such principles to the maintenance of large, complex, long-lived, successful systems. In this paper we take Eclipse as the case study and check whether its architecture follows, throughout multiple releases, some principles proposed in the literature

Towards a Framework for Testing Structural Source-Code Regularities

As size and complexity of software systems increase, preserving the design and specification of their implementation structure gains importance in order to maintain the evolvability of the system. However, due to constant changes, the implementation structure and its documentation tend to dilute over time. Building on the underlying models of intensional views and intensional relations, our IntensiVE tool-suite helps a developer in documenting structural source-code regularities, verifying them and offering fine-grained feedback when the code does not satisfy those regularities

IntensiVE, a toolsuite for documenting and checking structural source-code regularities

As size and complexity of software systems increase, preserving the design and specification of their implementation structure gains importance in order to maintain the evolvability of the system. However, due to constant changes, the implementation structure and its documentation tend to dilute over time. To address this problem, we developed IntensiVE: a toolsuite for documenting and checking structural source-code regularities. Building on the underlying models of intensional views and relations, the toolsuite helps a developer in documenting structural source-code regularities, verifying them and offering fine-grained feedback when the source-code does not satisfy those regularities. By illustrating our tools on a Smalltalk application, we show that violations of the source code against the structural regularities can be detected easily and that our toolsuite provides useful feedback for a developer to refine the regularities or to fix the code so that it does satisfy the regularities.Anglai

Using intentional source-code views to aid software maintenance

The conceptual structure of existing software systems is often implicit or non-existing in the source code. We propose the lightweight abstraction of intentional source-code views as a means of making these conceptual structures more explicit. Based on the experience gained with two case studies, we illustrate how intentional source-code views can simplify and improve software understanding, maintenance and evolution in various ways. We present the results as a catalog of usage scenarios in a pattern-like format

A comparative framework for design recovery tools

While many commercial and academic design recovery tools have been proposed over the years, assessing their relevance and comparing them is difficult due to the lack of a well-defined, comprehensive, and common framework. In this paper, we introduce such a common comparative framework. The framework builds upon our own experience and extends existing comparative frameworks. We illustrate the comparative framework on two specific design recovery tools