Automatic modularity conformance checking

Abstract

According to Parnas's information hiding principle and Baldwin and Clark's design rule theory, the key step to decomposing a system into modules is to determine the design rules (or in Parnas's terms, interfaces) that decouple otherwise coupled design decisions and to hide decisions that are likely to change in independent modules. Given a modular design, it is often difficult to determine whether and how its implementation realizes the designed modularity. Manually comparing code with abstract design is tedious and error-prone. We present an automated approach to check the conformance of implemented modularity to designed modularity, using design structure matrices as a uniform representation for both. Our experiments suggest that our approach has the potential to manifest the decoupling effects of design rules in code, and to detect modularity deviation caused by implementation faults. We also show that design and implementation models together provide a comprehensive view of modular structure that makes certain implicit dependencies within code explicit. Copyright 2008 ACM.