Bernhard Merkle

Bernhard Merkle (Bernhard.Merkle@gmail.com) works as a Software Architect and Engineer for Software Engineering in the Research & Development Department at SICK AG, one of the worlds leading producers of sensors and sensor solutions. He serves as internal consultant for the complete Software Development Cycle and is responsible for Process and Methods selection as well as Tool Evaluation and Introduction.

In his spare time he gives a lecture about MDSD (Model Driven Software Development)at the University of Furtwangen in the Faculty Application Architecture Master. He regularly writes technical Articles about those and new technologies in IT-magazines and also gave sessions at various conferences (e.g. ACCU, Codegeneration, Conquest, EclipseCon, EclipseSummit, OOP, IX and Splash).

Presentation: "Stop the Architecture Erosion!"

Track: Software Architecture Improvements

Time: Wednesday 15:35 - 16:35

Location: Elizabeth Windsor, Fifth Floor

Abstract:

During the evolution of a software system, it becomes more and more difficult to understand the originally planned software architecture. Often a architectural degeneration happens because of various reasons during the development phases.

In this session we will be looking on how to avoid such architectural decay and degeneration and how continuous monitoring can improve the situation.(and avoid architectural violations)In addition we will look at "refactoring in the large" and how refactoring can be simulated.

IDE like Eclipse and Idea Intelli-J JDT have some basic support to enforce dependency rules but as we will see for real architectural checking we need much more...

We will also look at some popular open source projects like ant, findbugs and eclipse (CDT/JDT) and see if and how far architectural erosions happens/ed there.

At the end you will have a good feeling of how far an automated and tool supported approach can lead to better results and how they can discover areas of erosion and suggest improvements.