An empirical study about software architecture configuration practices with the Java spring framework

Abstract

Software architecture modeling plays a key role in software development and, beyond, in software quality. The Spring framework is widely used in industry to deploy software. This paper evaluates whether Spring fosters good practices for architecture definition. It describes the results of an empirical study, based on a corpus of open-source Spring projects. Analysis shows that a strong (70%) majority of projects mixes all Spring architecture definition features. This can be considered as a pragmatic use of a very flexible tool. However, few good practice documentation and tool assistance exist to prevent hazardous architecture constructions. The paper highlights these situations and concludes on recommendations to assist developers.