Conformidade e visualização arquitetural em linguagens dinâmicas

Abstract

As software systems evolve, the architectural erosion process nullifies the well-known benefits provided by an architectural design. Such erosion process is even more severe in software systems developed in dynamic typed languages. The reasons are twofold: (i) some resources provided by such languages make developers more propitious to break the planned architecture, and (ii) the developers’ community lacks tool support for architectural purposes. To address these shortcomings, this paper presents a conformance and visualization approach based on static code analysis techniques and a type inference heuristic. The central idea is to provide the developers’ community with means to control the architectural erosion process by reporting architectural violations and visualizing the high-level model of the concrete architecture. This paper also describes a tool—called ArchRuby—that implements our approach and reports results from applying our solution in two real-world systems.