Mitigating Technical and Architectural Debt with Sonargraph

Abstract

Sonargraph is a static analyzer with a focus on software architecture and metrics. The motivation to create Sonargraph came from the assumption that architectural debt (aka structural debt) is the most toxic form of technical debt. Repairing a broken architecture requires global and high-risk changes, while fixing other forms of technical debt mostly involves low-risk local changes. Therefore, the tool enables architects and developers to formally describe their architectural blueprint using a custom DSL (domain specific language). Once defined architectural rules can be checked and enforced in an automated way in all stages of the development process. This guarantees that a software system will never end up as the notorious "big ball of mud". Sonargraph currently supports Java, C#, C/C++ and Python and is used by hundreds of organizations worldwide.