Architectural Consistency Checking in Plugin-Based Software Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces DepCoL, a domain-specific language for defining and checking plugin dependency constraints, along with an Eclipse plugin to ensure architectural consistency in plugin-based systems during development.

Contribution

It presents DepCoL, a novel language for specifying plugin dependency constraints, and an Eclipse tool for automated consistency checking in plugin-based software systems.

Findings

DepCoL simplifies defining dependency constraints for plugin groups.

The Eclipse plugin enables real-time consistency checks during development.

Using DepCoL reduces architecture erosion in plugin-based systems.

Abstract

Manually ensuring that the implementation of a software system is consistent with the software architecture is a laborious and error-prone task. Thus, a variety of approaches towards automated consistency checking have been developed to counteract architecture erosion. However, these approaches lack means to define and check architectural restrictions concerning plugin dependencies, which is required for plugin-based software systems. In this paper, we propose a domain-specific language called Dependency Constraint Language (DepCoL) to facilitate the definition of constraints concerning plugin dependencies. Using DepCoL, it is possible to define constraints affecting groups of plugins, reducing the required specification effort, to formulate constraints for specific plugins only and to refine constraints. Moreover, we provide an Eclipse plugin, which checks whether the software system under development is consistent with the modeled constraints. This enables a seamless integration into the development process to effortless check consistency during development of the software system. In this way, developers are informed about dependency violations immediately and this supports developers in counteracting architecture erosion.