Towards Continuous Reference Architecture Conformance Analysis

Reference architectures (RA) are reusable architectures for artifacts in a particular domain. They can serve as a basis for designing new architectures, but also as a means for quality control during system development. Quality control is performed through checking the conformance of systems in development to (company-wide) reference architectures. If performed manually, reference architecture conformance checking is a time- and resource-intensive process. In this paper we outline an approach for reference architecture conformance checking of application architectures in the banking domain. Reference architectures are defined on the basis of reusable rules, consisting of roles and of constraints on roles and role relationships. Conformance checking can be performed semi-automatically and continuously by automating important steps like the extraction of the actual application architecture, the binding of reference architecture roles to the elements of a specific application architecture, and the evaluation of the reference architecture rules for an application architecture.