Run-Time Monitoring-Based Evaluation and Communication Integrity Validation of Software Architectures

Architecture descriptions greatly contribute to the understanding, evaluation and evolution of software but despite this, up-to-date software architecture views are rarely available. Typically only initial descriptions of the static view are created but during the development and evolution process the software drifts away from its description. Methods and corresponding tool support for reconstructing and evaluating the current architecture views have been developed and proposed, but they usually address the reconstruction of static and dynamic views separately. Especially the dynamic views are usually bloated with low-level information (e.g., Object interactions) making the understanding and evaluation of the behavior very intricate. To overcome this, we presented ARAMIS, a general architecture for building tool-based approaches that support the architecture-centric evolution and evaluation of software systems with a strong focus on their behavior. This work presents ARAMIS-CICE, an instantiation of ARAMIS. Its goal is to automatically test if the run-time interactions between architecture units match the architecture description. Furthermore, ARAMIS-CICE characterizes the intercepted behavior using two newly-defined architecture metrics. We present the fundamental concepts of ARAMIS-CICE: its meta-model, metrics and implementation. We then discuss the results of a two-folded evaluation. The evaluation shows very promising results.