Architecture-Based Cross-Component Issue Management and Propagation Analysis

This paper addresses the challenge of issue management in complex, component-based software architectures. In these systems, issues in one component often propagate across the architecture along the call chains. Yet, traditional issue management systems (IMSs) are limited to the boundaries of a single component and lack mechanisms for managing issues concerning their architectural dependencies. We present Gropius, a novel method that enhances issue management by integrating issues in an architecture graph. Gropius allows semantically linking issues across different components, synchronizes changes with underlying IMSs like GitHub, and allows modeling the architecture ontologically by defining the components' semantics at runtime. We explore whether combining issue and architecture management improves the development of component-based architectures regarding issue management. We hypothesize that this method will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of identifying and resolving cross-component issues, maintaining a comprehensive view of the application's state.