An industrial case study of architecture conformance

A software designer often has little control over, or means of checking, whether his design is being adhered to, once the implementation begins. This 'architectural drift', where the original design of the system and the as-implemented design of the system diverge, can cause serious problems for evolution, maintenance and the comprehensibility of a system if it remains undocumented or uncorrected. The earlier such discrepancies can be identified, the better. This paper reports on a case study designed to evaluate a proposed approach for monitoring architectural drift during software development. The proposed approach differs significantly from existing design conformance approaches in that it has been designed for application within a forward engineering context. The findings show the utility of the approach in identifying architectural drift but also illustrate a number of improvements that could be made to the technique to further promote architecture conformance.