Integrated Formal Tools for Software Architecture Smell Detection

Abstract

The architecture smells are the poor design practices applied to the software architecture design. The smells in software architecture design can be cascaded to cause the issues in the system implementation and significantly affect the maintainability and reliability attribute of the software system. The prevention of architecture smells at the design phase can therefore improve the overall quality of the software system. This paper presents a framework that supports the detection of architecture smells based on the formalization of architecture design. Our modeling specification supports representing both structural and behavioral aspect of software architecture design; it allows the smells to be analyzed and detected with the provided tools. Our framework has been applied to seven architecture smells that violate different design principles. The evaluation has been conducted and the result shows that our detection approach gives accurate results and performs well on different size of models. With the proposed framework, other architecture smells can be defined and detected using the process and tools presented in this paper.