The latest Software Engineering Radio episode has Bernhard Merkle of SICK, a friend of mine, speaking on Architecture Analysis.

Here’s the synopsis: “During Evolution of a software system, it becomes more and more difficult to understand the originally planned software architecture. Often an architectural degeneration happens because of various reasons during the development phases. In this session we will be looking how to avoid such architectural decay and degeneration and how continuous monitoring can improve the situation (and avoid architectural violations). In addition we will look at “refactoring in the large” and how refactoring can be simulated. A new family of “lint like tools for software architectures” is currently emerging in the marketplace I will show some examples and how they scale and support you in real world projects.”

The Axivion Bauhaus Suite, which Software Acumen distributes in the UK & Ireland, is one of the tools mentioned in the podcast. In fact it was Bernhard that drew my attention to the toolset a while back as he’d been using it at SICK and shared his experiences of it at the ACCU conference.

Of course this podcast also ties into the themes of my When Good Architecture Goes Bad conference sessions I ran earlier in the year. If it can raise awareness of these new classes of tool then so much the better as far as I’m concerned.