Software architecture erosion, the divergence of a software system’s implementation from its intended architecture, is according to studies a prevalent but yet under-studied phenomenon. During the 10th European Conference on Software Architecture, ECSA, Computer Science at Karlstad University co-organized and hosted “The 3rd Workshop on Software Architecture Erosion and Architectural Consistency (SAEroCon 2016)”.
- As confirmed by the participating practitioners, the workshop touches upon an important aspect of software evolution. The discussions and the exchange of ideas were very fruitful, not only for our own research but for the community interested in this field as such. In particular, the commitment of many participants to jointly create a better foundation for evaluating, comparing and benchmarking techniques against erosion is a very promising result, says Sebastian Herold, researcher within Computer Science at Karlstad University and one of the workshop co-chairs.
As our society and businesses depend more and more on software systems, it is of crucial importance that such systems can be efficiently adapted, maintained and evolved. Software architecture erosion is a threat to these desirable properties of software and may cause systems to be increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain and evolve. At Computer Science at Karlstad University, software evolution is one of the research focuses.
- We look at how to detect, handle and prevent software architecture erosion, in order to make maintaining and evolving software easier and more cost efficient, says Sebastian Herold. During the workshop we discussed several current approaches for recovering software architectures, checking architectural consistency and detection of erosion. Moreover, Tobias Diez from the JabRef open source project was with us and helped us recovering the system’s architecture. The results are available to interested researchers, providing a base for comparing and benchmarking different approaches.
The workshop was co-organized with Lero - The Irish Software Research Centre and Clausthal University of Technology in Germany. About 20 participants from academia and research, coming from six different countries, attended the workshop. It was held in Copenhagen on November 28-29, co-located with the European Conference on Software Architecture.
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