Dominik Rost

Constructive architecture compliance checking — an experiment on support by live feedback

This paper describes our lessons learned and experiences gained from turning an analytical reverse engineering technology - architecture compliance checking - into a constructive quality engineering technique. Constructive compliance checking constantly monitors the modifications made by developers. When a structural violation is detected, the particular developer receives live feedback allowing prompt removal of the violations and hence, training the developers on the architecture. An experiment with six component development teams gives evidence that this training pro-actively prevents architecture decay. The three teams supported by the live compliance checking inserted about 60% less structural violations into the architecture than did the three other development teams. Based on the results, we claim that constructive compliance checking is a promising application of reverse engineering technology to the software implementation phase.

Distilling Best Practices for Agile Development from Architecture Methodology

Agile development and software architecture are not the enemies any more they seemed to be some years ago. It is agreed that agile development needs some form of architecting, too. However, how this architecting should look like is widely unclear. In this paper, we further characterize the relationship of agile development and architecting. We present our key idea to distill practically applicable and accessible architecture best practices from existing architecture approaches and tailor them for agile development. We describe the identification and template-based documentation of architecting best practices and present an example, which were already successfully applied in industry. Additionally, we share experiences we made in industrial development projects regarding the combination of architecting and agile development.

Architecture Engagement Purposes: Towards a Framework for Planning "Just Enough"-Architecting in Software Engineering

Software architecture has been proven as a conceptual tool to manage the development and evolution of a software product. However, integrating architecting as an activity in software engineering is still perceived as a major challenge in practice. Our observation from many projects centered around architecture is that most organizations actually fail to plan architecting activities and align them in product development. The consequence is that the value of the architecture is underrated and the power of architecture remains more often than not unexploited. In this paper, we introduce the notion of architecture engagement purpose -- an auxiliary construct to align architecting with other engineering activities in the product lifecycle. We gained first promising results in applying it in industrial projects, where explicit architecture engagement purposes enabled the organization in planning and tracking architecting as an activity within their software engineering.

Supporting Architects in Mastering the Complexity of Open Software Ecosystems

Software ecosystems define a new class of systems where multiple organizations contribute in form of an open software system and its extensions. In this position paper, we characterize business, organizational, and in particular technical challenges, which the architect of such an open ecosystem has to address. One key challenge we identified is how to retain certain system qualities under the influence of multiple external system extensions. We provide an initial template with factors and potential values helping an architect in characterizing the open software system and its environment. Furthermore, we illustrate an open system by a fictional scenario from the agricultural domain. The discussion of the challenges, the characterization template and the example are significant steps towards a systematic engineering method establishing open ecosystems.