ReflexML: UML-Based Architecture-to-Code Traceability and Consistency Checking

The decay of software architecture - the divergent evolution of architecture models and the derived code - is one of the reasons for a decreasing maintainability of software systems. Several approaches for architecture-to-code consistency checking exist that stop the decay by detecting a divergence after evolution steps of either the architecture or the corresponding code. Known approaches have two main insufficiencies. First, the effort to derive and maintain the consistency checks is higher than necessary or they cannot be applied a posteriori. Second, they are not well integrated into UML-based model driven engineering. In the paper we present ReflexML: A UML-embedded mapping of architecture models to code plus a rich set of predefined consistency checks based on that mapping. The mapping is described with a UML profile that allows to attach AOP type patterns to an UML component model to define its reflexion on code elements. This abolishes the two insufficiencies of current approaches. We apply ReflexML to an industry project to demonstrate its effectiveness and its capability of a seamless integration into a pre-existing UML architecture model.