For his latest Automation for the people installment, “Asserting architectural soundness”, Stelligent CTO, Paul Duvall, demonstrates how using tests such as JUnit, JDepend, and Ant can play a role in enforcing architectural reliability.

Asserting architectural soundness describes a technique to build checks into your build scripts to proactively detect violations while coding. Locating potential deviations as soon as they’re introduced, instead of waiting to flag problems after the fact, ultimately leads to better quality software delivered faster.

In addition, Scott Laningham, host/editor of IBM developerWorks podcasts, interviewed Paul about the software development need that he addressed in the article. Paul kicked off the interview by indicating that,

Over time software architectures tend to become brittle. The architecture that you think you have versus the architecture that you actually have, as its manifested in the code, is often different.

Whether you read the article or listen to the podcast (hopefully both!), you’ll undoubtedly carry away the need to take charge of your architecture by using a proactive build process.