CASTOR: uma técnica de verificação de conformidade para arquiteturas de software baseada em componentes.

Abstract

Software plays a critical role in almost every facet of our daily life. While complexity and size are increased by new features and advanced software requirements, the pressure is higher than ever to reduce the time required for designing, prototyping, testing and manufacturing. The results are low-quality products with high software failure rates. In this context, two problems are frequent: software deterioration and the lack of conceptual integrity. The former one is due to the natural evolution of the software since the initial stages of development. Changes are part of the process, but if not well managed they can disfigure the projet to a such point that it becomes very hard to understand and maintain. The latter refers to the difficulty to keep uniform the concepts and abstractions used by the team along the implementation phases. The more lack of conceptual integrity more the system tends to exhibit low cohesion of functionalities and divergent aspects. This work approaches such problems relying on software architecture as a reference model to the code evolution. More specifically, we investigate how to evaluate such model against the software in order to reveal discrepancies. So it becomes possible to identify signs of software deterioration, as well as violations of the integrity consensually established in the architecutral documents. In summary, the purpose of this work is the development of a technique capable to provide the necessary evidences that certain code does not conform to the intended design. In this way, we hope to contribute improving the software quality concerned to the presented problems.