Checking Conformance with Reference Architectures: A Case Study

Reference architecture can help in enterprise architecture management to develop and operate standardized and maintainable software landscapes. Similar to the software architectures of single systems, however, they are threatened by architecture erosion, i.e. the continuous divergence between intended architectures and their actual realizations. Architecture erosion has negative effects on the maintainability of software systems and on other quality attributes. In this paper, we report on the application of a rule-based architecture conformance checking approach in an industrial case study in which we investigate an industrial reference architecture for the German public administration. The reference architecture and its constraints for implementations are formalized as architecture rules enabling automatic conformance checking tool support. The results from the case study show that the approach is capable of checking reference architecture conformance in realistic settings and helps to avoid software architecture erosion.