Author supplied: Teaching software architecture (SA) in a bachelor computer science curriculum can be challenging, as the concepts are on a high abstraction level and not easy to grasp for students. Good techniques and tools that help with addressing the challenging SA aspects in a didactically responsible way are needed. In this tool demo we show how we used the software architecture compliance checking tool HUSACCT for addressing various concepts of SA in our courses on software architecture. The students were introduced to architectural reconstruction and architecture compliance checking, which helped them to gain important insights in aspects such as the relation between architectural models and code and the specification of dependency relations between architecture elements as concrete rules.
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Author supplied: "Abstract Software Architecture Compliance Checking (SACC) is an approach to verify conformance of implemented program code to high-level models of architectural design. Static SACC focuses on the modular software architecture and on the existence of rule violating dependencies between modules. Accurate tool support is essential for effective and efficient SACC. This document describes a test approach that may be used to determine how accurate a tested SACCT-tool is with respect to dependency analysis and violation reporting. This technical report is intended as a test manual and describes how a SACCT-tool can be tested. Two separate tests are described: the Benchmark test, and the FreeMind test."
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Abstract-Architecture Compliance Checking (ACC) is an approach to verify the conformance of implemented program code to high-level models of architectural design. ACC is used to prevent architectural erosion during the development and evolution of a software system. Static ACC, based on static software analysis techniques, focuses on the modular architecture and especially on rules constraining the modular elements. A semantically rich modular architecture (SRMA) is expressive and may contain modules with different semantics, like layers and subsystems, constrained by rules of different types. To check the conformance to an SRMA, ACC-tools should support the module and rule types used by the architect. This paper presents requirements regarding SRMA support and an inventory of common module and rule types, on which basis eight commercial and non-commercial tools were tested. The test results show large differences between the tools, but all could improve their support of SRMA, what might contribute to the adoption of ACC in practice.
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