SHF: Small: Collaborative Research: Automating the Detection of Architectural Degradation in Software Systems

SHF：小型：协作研究：自动检测软件系统中的架构退化

• 批准号: 1117593
• 负责人: Nenad Medvidovic
• 金额: $ 25万
• 依托单位: University of Southern California
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-08-01 至 2015-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1117593&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SHF; Small; Collaborative; Research; Automating

Over time, a software system's architecture eventually deviates from the original designer's intent and degrades through unplanned introduction of changes that invalidate original design decisions. Architectural degradation increases the cost of making new modifications and decreases a system?s reliability, until engineers are no longer able to effectively evolve the system. At that point, the system's actual architecture may have to be recovered from the implementation artifacts, but this is a time-consuming and error-prone process, and leaves critical issues unresolved: the problems caused by architectural degradation will likely be obfuscated by the system?s many elements and their interrelationships, thus risking further degradation. This collaborative project aims at pinpointing locations in a software system's architecture that reflect architectural degradation. The proposed research comprises four integrated research tasks: (1) Develop a catalog of commonly occurring symptoms of degradation. (2) Develop an architecture recovery technique that automatically extracts both a system's major building blocks and the concerns that influence, drive, and interact with these building blocks. (3) Devise a technique for formally capturing the recovered architectural design decisions, their involving concerns, and the identified causes of degradation. (4) Devise a suite of techniques that leverage the catalog to automatically identify system-specific instances of degradation. As a result, this project will have a potential for broad impact by providing a rigorous, scientific basis for software engineers to streamline the currently prohibitively expensive and error-prone system maintenance and evolution tasks.

随着时间的流逝，软件系统的体系结构最终偏离了原始设计师的意图，并通过计划外的更改降低了原始设计决策的变化。建筑退化增加了进行新修改并降低系统的可靠性的成本，直到工程师不再能够有效地发展系统为止。到那时，系统的实际体系结构可能必须从实施工件中恢复，但这是一个耗时且容易出错的过程，并且尚未解决关键问题：系统降低引起的问题可能会被系统的许多元素及其相互关联所掩盖，从而有可能进一步降低降级。该协作项目旨在指出反映体系结构退化的软件系统体系结构中的位置。拟议的研究包括四个综合研究任务：（1）开发出常见发生的降解症状的目录。 （2）开发一种体系结构恢​​复技术，该技术将自动提取系统的主要构建块，以及影响，驱动和与这些构建块互动的关注点。 （3）设计一种技术，用于正式捕获回收的建筑设计决策，涉及关注以及确定的降级原因。 （4）设计一套利用目录自动识别系统特定降解实例的技术。 结果，该项目将通过为软件工程师提供严格的科学依据来简化当前昂贵且容易出错的系统维护和演变任务，从而产生广泛影响。