Component types qualification in Java legacy code driven by communication integrity rules

Abstract

Component Based Software Engineering is a way to improve software modularization and to embed architectural concerns in the source code. Making explicit the architectural concerns in code helps to mitigate the problem of architectural erosion. The restructuring of legacy code with components in mind requires the use of tools to assess compliance with component programming principles. The property of communication integrity is one of the major principles for implementing software architectures. However, there is a paucity of tools for assessing the quality of code components. To cope with this issue, we define a component model in Java and a tool for identifying component types, which relies on a set of rules to statically check potential violations of the communication integrity property in Java source code. We illustrate its application with a case study and report the results of our experiments with it.