Enhancing architecture-implementation conformance with change management and support for behavioral mapping

Abstract

It is essential for software architecture to be consistent with implementation during software development. Existing architecture-implementation mapping approaches are not sufficient due to a variety of reasons, including lack of support for change management and mapping of behavioral architecture specification. A new approach called 1.x-way architecture-implementation mapping is presented in this paper to address these issues. Its contribution includes deep separation of generated and non-generated code, an architecture change model, architecture-based code regeneration, and architecture change notification. The approach is implemented in ArchStudio 4, an Eclipse-based architecture development environment. To evaluate its utility, we refactored the code of ArchStudio, and replayed changes that had been made to ArchStudio in two research projects by redoing them with the developed tool.