KDM as the Underlying Metamodel in Architecture-Conformance Checking

Abstract

There are two important artifacts in any Architecture-Conformance Checking (ACC) approach: i) the representation of the PA and ii) the representation of the CA. Many times, inside the same ACC approach, distinct meta-models are adopted for representing the PA and the CA. Besides, it is common the adoption of meta-models unsuitable for representing architectural details. This heterogeneity makes the checking algorithms complex since they must cope with instances that comply with two different meta-models or do not have proper architectural abstractions. KDM is an ISO meta-model proposed by OMG whose goal is to become the standard representation of systems in modernization tools. It is able to represent many aspects of a software system, including source code details, architectural abstractions and the dependencies between them. However, up to this moment, there is no research showing how KDM can be used in ACC approaches. Therefore we present an investigation of adopting KDM as the unique meta-model for representing PA and CA in ACC approaches. We have developed a three-steps ACC approach called ArchKDM. In the first step a DSL assists in the PA specification; in the second step an Eclipse plug-in provides the necessary support and in the last step the checking is conducted. We have also evaluate our approach using two real world systems and the results were very promising, revealing no false positives or negatives.