The observant among you will have noticed that Software Acumen are now the exclusive UK and Ireland distributors of the Axivion Bauhaus Suite.

Bauhaus is a solution for stopping software erosion -  the constant decay of the internal structure of a software system that occurs in all phases of software development and maintenance.

Bauhaus is based on over 150 man-years of research at the universities of Stuttgart and Bremen. Axivion was set up a couple of years ago to productise the research but still gets regular input from the research community.

Bauhaus stops software erosion by pinpointing the causes of erosion using a set of complementary software analysis tools. These include:

Software Architecture Visualization: Lets you explore the architecture of your software “as is”.

Software Architecture Checking: Highlights discrepancies between your intended architecture and the architecture “as is” allowing you to enforce architectural conformance.

Software Cycle Detection: Helps you remove cyclic dependencies between parts of the software and so make them independently testable and modifiable.

Software Metrics: Provide you with key measurements about different aspects of the software.

Software Clone Detection: Detects duplicate and near-duplicate parts of the software (on average making up 20% of a code base).

Software Interface Analysis: Lets you explore dependencies and connections between different parts of the software.

Software Component Detection: Finds logical groupings of elements of the software.

Software Dead Code Detection: Helps remove parts of the software that are not used.

Software Dominance Analysis: Shows the degree of locality of elements in the source.

There’s also a scripting add-on with which you can add your own analyses or integrate your analyses with Bauhaus data. This add-on uses Python on top of Bauhaus’s open APIs.

Bauhaus analysis tools are available for the C, C++, C#, Java, Ada, Visual Basic and COBOL languages making it a very comprehensive solution, even for multi-language development teams.

Customers include Robert Bosch, Raiffeisen Bausparkasse, Versant, Nero and Sick AG.

I’ll be writing more about Bauhaus in the coming months so keep an eye out if you are interested in stopping software erosion.