What is Architectural Erosion

Dynamic aspects of behavior of software systems in dynamically reconfigurable runtime architectures can result in significant architectural violations during runtime. In such cases, a system's architecture evolves during the runtime according to the actual state of the system's environment, and consequently, runtime reconfigurations may eventually lead to incorrect architecture configurations that were not considered during the system's design phases. These architectural violations are known as architectural erosion or architectural drift, and they contribute to an increasing brittleness of the system, or a lack of its coherence and clarity of its form. This chapter describes and compares possible measures to prevent architectural violations in dynamic service and component models. The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the applicability of those measures in combination with advanced features of reconfigurable runtime architectures such as ad hoc reconfiguration, service or component mobility, composition hierarchy preservation, and architectural aspects.