Inspired by Neal Ford’s presentation at our Change is the Only constant event I started experimenting with architectural fitness functions. An architectural fitness function provides an objective integrity assessment of some architectural characteristic(s). If you want to take a deeper dive into evolutionary architectures including fitness functions take look at Neals book: Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change. Neal’s slides contained an example of verifying package dependencies from a Unit Test using JDepend.

In this blog post we’ll elaborate on that approach and create a Unit Test that verifies that our code complies to the chosen packaging strategies using an alternative to JDepend named code-assert. We’ll verify two types of packaging strategies; package by layer and package by feature. For a definition of these strategies please have a look at this blog from Simon Brown.