Quality attribute traceability based on Clone Microtactics

Traceability is a technique that allows the validation and verification of product requirements. Traceability is more important in safety–critical systems. Safety–critical standards, such as automotive ISO 26262 and avionics DO-178C, mandate traceability. Tracing functional requirements is a relatively mature field of research that involves multiple studies. However, the traceability of quality attributes remains a challenge. Quality attributes have a wide range of effects on a system and are achieved from various architectural perspectives. Architectural patterns and tactics are commonly used to obtain quality attributes. An architectural tactic is a fine-grained design decision to achieve specified quality attributes in source code. Therefore, identifying architectural tactics in the source code makes it possible to trace quality attributes. This paper introduces a new quality attribute traceability approach based on Clone Microtactics. A Microtactic is a microstructure associated with an architectural tactic that is automatically identifiable in the conceptual representation of the source code. The concept of Clone Microtactics is inspired by semantic code clones. Clone Microtactics are similar in behavior and context, although they do not have the same structure. The proposed approach identifies architectural tactics in the source code based on Clone Microtactics. Identifying architectural tactics also enables quality attribute traceability in the source code. The proposed method is a process in three main phases. In the first phase, a reference model of the Microtactics is created manually. This model is generated once at the beginning of the process. In the second phase, a conceptual model of the modified part of the source code is created. This step is repeated for each change in the source code. In the third phase, using the hybrid similarity method, Clone Microtactics are identified. The proposed approach is implemented on ten architectural tactics related to availability, performance, and security. Also, the results of this approach have been evaluated on the Hadoop framework. The evaluation results show that the proposed approach provides acceptable results compared with other methods in this field.