Software Architecture Discovery for Testability, Performance, and

Maintainability of Industrial Systems

Dharmalingam Ganesan

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Thesis Context: ADAM Project• ADAM: Architecture Discovery and Analysis Method

ADAM

• ADAM Homepage: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~rkrikhaa/adam/

• Detected software structure/behavior errors for many organizations

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ADAM Team

Prof. Dr. Chris Verhoef(Promotor)

Dr. René L. Krikhaar(Co-Promotor)

Dr. Mikael Lindvall(Co-Promotor)

Dharmalingam Ganesan(Doctoral Candidate)

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About the cover cartoon• Financial loss due to poor engineering• Each module looks good but poor quality as a whole• As-built structure ≠ specified structure

Our Research: How to analyze and improve quality of software whose

structures are invisible

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Software is everywhere in our society

But it’s invisible – you don’t see it

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Software errors are also common

Crash: mismatch foot vs. meter Killed: radiation overdose Loss: mix quantity and price

Typical reasons for errors:• Flawed and complex design

• Not designed for testing

• Lack of independent reviews

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Characteristics of industrial systems

Unknown modules at runtime

Family of systems

Several languages in a systemToo much software

• Need computer-aided methods for repeatable and efficient analysis to avoid software errors in the field

Distributed systems

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Typical questions of the ADAM

Equivalent modules behave in the same way?

System structured for testing?

Will it run fast? Unrelated concepts separated?

Need to discover architectural views from software to answer

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Typical outputs of the ADAM

Modules difficult to test & maintainBehavioral errorsStructural errors (shortcut)

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