Automated design tests to check Hibernate design recommendations

Developers must follow some architectural recommendations in order to obtain the expected behavior of frameworks. For instance, Hibernate users must implement specific methods and annotate specific classes to properly store and retrieve elements in a database. If the code of the application fails to follow such recommendations, in extreme cases, the non-conformities with architectural rules can even lead to data loss. In this paper, we present an exploratory study on the conformity of 77 open-source projects regarding Hibernate architectural rules. We identified that 76 of 77 projects do not follow such rules and almost all persistent entities fail in at least one of them. We also found that architectural violations can cause abnormalities in the behavior during the use of the framework. We discuss the reasons and implications of the projects simply ignoring architectural recommendations.