97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know

Chapter 7. The Benefits of Codifying and Asserting Architectural Quality

Daniel Bryant

Your continuous delivery build pipeline should be the primary location where agreed-upon architectural qualities for your applications are codified and enforced. However, these automated quality assertions shouldn’t replace continued team discussions about standards and quality levels, and they should definitely not be used to avoid intra- or inter-team communication. That said, checking and publishing quality metrics within the build pipeline can prevent the gradual decay of architectural quality that might otherwise be hard to notice.

If you’re wondering why you should test your architecture, the ArchUnit motivation page has you covered. It starts with a familiar story: once upon a time, an architect drew a series of nice architectural diagrams that illustrated the components of the system and how they should interact. Then the project got bigger and use cases more complex, new developers dropped in and old developers dropped out. This eventually led to new features being added in any way that fit. Before long, everything depended on everything, and any change could have an unforeseeable effect on any other component. I’m sure many readers will recognize this scenario.

ArchUnit is an open source, extensible library for checking the architecture of your Java code by using a Java unit-test framework ...