OPLA-Tool-ASP: a Tool to Prevent Architectural Smells in Search-based Product Line Architecture Design

Abstract

Search-based algorithms have been successfully employed in Product Line Architecture (PLA) design in the seminal approach named Multi-Objective Approach for Product-Line Architecture Design (MOA4PLA). This approach generates a set of alternative PLA designs, which optimize different architectural properties. In addition to these properties, the alternative PLA designs should have as few architectural smells as possible. Architectural smells can negatively impact PLA variability, PLA extensibility, SPL maintainability, and other non-functional attributes. However, one of the main findings of a previous study is that the tool that automates the application of MOA4PLA adversely introduces architectural smells in the automatically generated solutions. In this work, we present OPLA-Tool-ASP, which is a tool that implements guidelines to detect and prevent the architectural smells Unused Interface, Unused Brick, Concern Overload, and Link Overload in the context of MOA4PLA. An empirical study was carried out to assess the effectiveness of OPLA-Tool-ASP in preventing the aforementioned smells in the resulting PLA designs. The obtained results pointed out that the proposed tool is effective in both preventing the smells and improving the architectural properties selected for optimization.