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Cited by 34Software Engineering ResearchAdvanced Software Engineering MethodologiesModel-Driven Software Engineering Techniques

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On the Evolutionary Nature of Architectural Violations

Brunet, Joao, Bittencourt, Roberto Almeida, Serey, Dalton, Figueiredo, Jorge·2012·2012 19th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering
DOI 10.1109/wcre.2012.35
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Abstract

Architectural conformance checking is the process of verifying whether a given software implementation conforms to the rules and decisions in an architectural model. Different conformance checking techniques have been proposed, and both academic and commercial tools use them for architecture evaluation. In this paper, we present an exploratory and longitudinal study on architectural violations of software systems. As an exploratory study, our aim has been to reveal patterns, raise hypotheses and form an initial body of knowledge on architectural violations, rather than test specific hypotheses. We have studied the evolution of four widely known open source systems for which we have trusted architectural models. The study encompasses the analysis of 19 bi-weekly versions of each system. In total, we analyzed more than 3,000 violations. From our observations, we have derived a series of facts. Four of them, deserve attention: 1) development teams of all studied projects seem to be aware of the presence of architectural violations in the code and all of them do perform perfective maintenance aimed at eliminating such violations, 2) despite all effort, the number of architectural violations, in the long term, is continuously growing, 3) in all studied systems there is a critical core, i.e., just a few design entities are responsible for the majority of violations, and 4) some violations seem to be "respawning", i.e., they are eliminated, but are likely to be back in future versions of the system.

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Cited by

  • Software Architecture in Practice: Challenges and Opportunities

    Wan, Z., Zhang, Y., Xia, X., Jiang, Y., & Lo, D. (2023) · Proceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/3611643.3616367 · Cited by 30

    “As our participants reported, some organizations use unit testing, stress testing, and performance testing frameworks, to continuously monitor the quality of software systems (P2a, P3a, P3c, P3e-f, P4b-d, P5a, P7a, P11a, P12a, P14a, P19b).”
    Background

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Metadata

Authors
Brunet, J., Bittencourt, R. A., Serey, D., & Figueiredo, J.
Affiliations
  • Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana (BR)
  • Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (BR)
ORCID
Venue
2012 19th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering
Publisher
IEEE
Published
2012-10
Pages
257-266
ISSN
1095-1350 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1109/wcre.2012.35
OpenAlex
W2105618101
Cited by
34
References
0
Citations by year
2025: 2 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 1 · 2016: 2 · 2015: 1 · 2014: 3 · 2013: 1
FWCI
1.26
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE) (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Software › Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Software › Model-Driven Software Engineering Techniques
Keywords
software architecture, software evolution, open source software, perfective maintenance, software architecture models

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: On the Evolutionary Nature of Architectural Violations. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1109/wcre.2012.35
The paper
Brunet, J., Bittencourt, R. A., Serey, D., & Figueiredo, J. (2012). On the Evolutionary Nature of Architectural Violations. 2012 19th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1109/wcre.2012.35