Sotograph Functions: Measuring Architecture Conformance and Quality

By means of predefined queries and metrics Sotograph detects a wide range of potential problems and determines information about many quality aspects. Besides architecture conformance these are the adherence to coding guidelines and rules, the existence of duplicated code blocks, and the identification of cyclically coupled artifacts. Sotograph also calculates metric values which are measuring size, coupling and complexity on different abstraction levels. This information can serve as input for Sotograph's other analysis tools, e.g. to visualize cyclically coupled groups of artifacts.

The following analyses are relevant for architecture management:

• Differences between architecture and implementation
• Interface violations: External access of private parts of subsystems
• Detection of all classes, files, packages and subsystems which are strongly coupled by cyclical relationships
• Identification of large duplicated code blocks
• Detection of methods, classes, files, packages and subsystems which are suspicious because of their size, coupling or complexity

It is also possible to specify and check own, project specific rules and metrics.

The screen dump below shows a graph with all subsystems and their dependencies layouted according to an architecture. Architecture violating dependencies are colored blue.

Illustration of packages that are strongly coupled by cyclical relationships. The packages are colored based on the comprising subsystem, i.e. all packages of the same subsystem have the same color. The variety of colors indicates that the cyclical relationships cross several subsystem boundaries.

Structural bottleneck: The central class “ContentController” is used by many classes and depends itself on many other classes. Sotograph makes it easy to detect objects with such characteristics.