headingimage

About Lero Research

Lero is the Irish software research centre.It brings together leading software research teams from Universities and Institutes of Technology in a coordinated centre of research excellence with a strong industry focus. Lero has raised the level and profile of Irish software research with such effect that it is now one of the best known and highly regarded software-related research centres in the world.  The centre has the proven capacity to attract and retain global research leaders and to make a substantial contribution both to software-related research and to the Irish economy. The Lero Centre is supported by a Research Centre grant from SFI, by other state grants, by industry contributions and by external funding (particularly the EU’s research programmes). Lero interfaces with a wide range of industry, state agencies, educational bodies and international collaborators to deliver on its twin goals of research excellence and social and economic relevance.

JITTAC: a just-in-time tool for architectural consistency

Abstract

Architectural drift is a widely cited problem in software engineering, where the implementation of a software system diverges from the designed architecture over time causing architecture inconsistencies. Previous work suggests that this architectural drift is, in part, due to programmers lack of architecture awareness as they develop code. JITTAC is a tool that uses a real-time Reflexion Modeling approach to inform programmers of the architectural consequences of their programming actions as, and often just before, they perform them. Thus, it provides developers with Just-In-Time architectural awareness towards promoting consistency between the as-designed architecture and the as-implemented system. JITTAC also allows programmers to give real-time feedback on introduced inconsistencies to the architect. This facilitates programmer-driven architectural change, when validated by the architect, and allows for more timely team-awareness of the actual architectural consistency of the system. Thus, it is anticipated that the tool will decrease architectural inconsistency over time and improve both developers and architect’s knowledge of their software’s architecture. The JITTAC demo is available to watch under the ‘Tools’ tab on this site.

Copyright © 2025 Lero. All rights reserved.