On The Understandability Of Semantic Constraints For Behavioral Software Architecture Compliance: A Controlled Experiment

Software architecture compliance is concerned with the alignment of implementation with its desired architecture and detecting potential inconsistencies. The study is specifically concerned with behavioral architecture compliance. That is, the focus is on semantic alignment of implementation and architecture. In particular, the study evaluates three representative approaches for describing semantic constraints in terms of their understandability, namely natural language descriptions as used in many architecture documentations today, a structured language based on specification patterns that abstract underlying temporal logic formulas, and a structured cause-effect language that is based on Complex Event Processing. We conducted a controlled experiment with 190 participants using a simple randomized design with one alternative per experimental unit.