Architecture compliance checking at run-time

  • Authors:

  • Dharmalingam Ganesan;Thorsten Keuler;Yutaro Nishimura

  • Affiliations:

  • Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering (CESE), 5825 University Research Court Suite 1300, College Park, Maryland 20740-3823, USA;Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE), Fraunhofer-Platz 1, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany;Ricoh Company, Ltd, 8-13-1 Ginza, 104-8222 Chuo-ku, Tokyo, Japan

  • Venue:
  • Information and Software Technology
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

In this paper, we report on our experiences with architecture compliance checking - the process of checking whether the planned or specified software architecture is obeyed by the running system - of an OSGi-based, dynamically evolving application in the office domain. To that end, we first show how to dynamically instrument a running system in the context of OSGi in order to collect run-time traces. Second, we explain how to bridge the abstraction gap between run-time traces and software architectures, through the construction of hierarchical Colored Petri nets (CP-nets). In addition, we demonstrate how to design reusable hierarchical CP-nets. In an industry example, we were able to extract views that helped us to identify a number of architecturally relevant issues (e.g., architectural style violations, behavior violations) that would not have been detected otherwise, and could have caused serious problems like system malfunctioning or unauthorized access to sensitive data. Finally, we package valuable experiences and lessons learned from this endeavor.