Automatic Modularity Conformance Checking

According to Parnas's information hiding principle and Baldwin and Clark's design rule theory, the key step to decomposing a system into modules is to determine the design rules (or in Parnas's terms, interfaces) that decouple otherwise coupled design decisions and to hide decisions that are likely to change in independent modules. Given a modular design, it is often difficult to determine whether and how its implementation realizes the designed modularity. Manually comparing code with abstract design is tedious and error-prone. The authors present an automated approach to check the conformance of implemented modularity to designed modularity, using design structure matrices as a uniform representation for both.