Preserving Architectural Decisions through Architectural Patterns ; Préserver les décisions architecturales à travers des patrons architecturaux

Architectural decisions have emerged as a means to maintain the quality of the architecture during its evolution. One of the most important decisions made by architects are those about the design approach such as the use of patterns or styles in the architecture. The structural nature of this type of decisions give them the potential to be controlled systematically. In the literature, there are some works on the automation of architectural decision violation checking. In this thesis we show that these works do not allow to detect all possible architectural decision violations.To solve this problem we propose an approach which: i) describes architectural patterns that hold the architectural decision definition, ii) integrates architectural decisions into an architectural model and, iii) automates the architectural decision conformance checking. The approach is implemented using Eclipse Modeling Framework and its accompanying technologies. Starting from well-known architectural patterns, we show that we can formalize all those related to the structural aspect. Through two experiments, we show that architectural decisions are well explained and all of their violations are detected. Composable software systems have been proved to support the adaptation to new requirements thanks to their flexibility. A typical method of composable software development is to select and combine a number of patterns that address the expected quality requirements. A lot of work have shown the interest of pattern composition. Nevertheless, one of the shortcomings of these work is the vaporization of composition information which leads to the problem of traceability and reconstructability of patterns. This thesis also proposes to give first- class status to pattern merging operators to facilitate the preservation of composition information. The approach is tool-supported and an empirical study has also been conducted to highlight its interests ; Les décisions architecturales ont émergé comme un moyen important pour maintenir la qualité de ...