A genetic approach to architectural pattern discovery

Architectural patterns represent reusable design of software architecture at a high level of abstraction. They can be used to structure new applications and to recover the modular structure of existing systems. Techniques like Architecture Compliance Checking (ACC) focus on testing whether realised artefacts adhere to the architecture. Typically, these techniques require a complete architecture as input. In this paper, we present a genetic approach to express and discover architectural patterns based on the allowed and disallowed dependencies between the pattern elements. Through static ACC, we validate the genuineness of the found instances. Initial validation shows the potential of the approach