Motivation and Impact of Modeling Erosion Using Static Architecture Conformance Checking

We motivate and describe why erosion modeling from a static architecture conformance checking point of view is important as well as the impact we think it can have on industry. Our research goal is to get a better understanding of erosion and develop smarter and simpler methods to assess erosion. We describe preliminary results from a retrospective, longitudinal case study of an open source software. The software system we study, JabRef, was created in 2003, and refactored to a layered structure to "transition from a spaghetti to a more structured architecture" in 2015. We construct a model from this new, layered architecture, and assess 30 versions of JabRef to find architectural conformance violations. Our preliminary results show a significant difference in productivity after refactoring and suggest that there is a connection between our model of erosion and productivity where more erosion gives lower productivity.