article

Playing Detective: Reconstructing Software Architecture from Available Evidence

Authors:

S. Jeromy CarrièreAuthors Info & Claims

Automated Software Engineering, Volume 6, Issue 2

Pages 107 - 138

https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008781513258

Published: 01 April 1999 Publication History

Abstract

Because a system‘s software architecture strongly influences its quality attributes such as modifiability, performance, and security, it is important to analyze and reason about that architecture. However, architectural documentation frequently does not exist, and when it does, it is often “out of sync” with the implemented system. In addition, it is rare that software development begins with a clean slate; systems are almost always constrained by existing legacy code. As a consequence, we need to be able to extract information from existing system implementations and utilize this information for architectural reasoning. This paper presents Dali, an open, lightweight workbench that aids an analyst in extracting, manipulating, and interpreting architectural information. By assisting in the reconstruction of architectures from extracted information, Dali helps an analyst redocument architectures, discover the relationship between “as-implemented” and “as-designed” architectures, analyze architectural quality attributes and plan for architectural change.

References

[1]

Bass, L., Clements, P., and Kazman, R. 1998. Software Architecture in Practice. Addison-Wesley.

Digital Library

[2]

Biggerstaff, T. 1989. Design recovery for maintenance and reuse. IEEE Computer, 22(7):36-49.

Digital Library

[3]

Brooks, F. 1975. The Mythical Man-Month--Essays on Software Engineering. Addison-Wesley.

Digital Library

[4]

Buhr, R. and Casselman, R. 1996. Use Case Maps for Object-Oriented Systems. Prentice-Hall.

Digital Library

[5]

Garlan, D., Monroe, B., and Wile, D. 1997. ACME: An interchange language for software architecture, 2nd edition, Technical Report, Carnegie Mellon University.

[6]

Griswold, R. and Griswold, M. 1983. The Icon Programming Language. Prentice-Hall.

Digital Library

[7]

Imagix Corporation, http://www.imagix.com

[8]

Kazman, R., Abowd, G., Bass, L., and Clements, P. 1996. Scenario-based analysis of software architecture. IEEE Software, 47-55.

Digital Library

[9]

Kazman, R., Abowd, G., Bass, L., and Webb, M. 1994. SAAM: A method for analyzing the properties of software architecture. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Software Engineering, Sorrento, Italy, pp. 81-90.

Digital Library

[10]

Kazman, R. and Burth, M. 1998. Assessing architectural complexity. Proceedings of 2nd Euromicro Working Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, Florence, Italy, pp. 104-112.

Digital Library

[11]

Kazman, R. and Carrière, J. 1996. An adaptable software architecture for rapidly creating information visualizations. Proceedings of Graphics Interface '96, Toronto, ON, pp. 17-27.

Digital Library

[12]

Kazman, R. and Carrière, S. J. 1998. View extraction and view fusion in architectural understanding. Fifth International Conference on Software Reuse, Victoria, BC, pp. 290-299.

Digital Library

[13]

Klein, M., Ralya, T., Pollak, B., Obenza, R., and Gonzales Harbour, M. 1993. A Practitioner's Handbook for Real-Time Analysis: Guide to Rate Monotonic Analysis for Real-Time Systems. Kluwer Academic.

Digital Library

[14]

Murphy, G. and Notkin, D. 1996. Lightweight lexical source model extraction. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 5(3):262-292.

Digital Library

[15]

Murphy, G., Notkin, D., and Lan, E. 1996. An empirical study of static call graph extractors. Proceedings of ICSE 18, Berlin, Germany, pp. 90-99.

Digital Library

[16]

Murphy, G., Notkin, D., and Sullivan, K. 1995. Software reflexion models: Bridging the gap between source and high-level models. Proceedings of the Third ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Washington, DC.

Digital Library

[17]

Reasoning Inc., http://www.reasoning.com

[18]

Shaw, M., DeLine, R., Klein, D., Ross, T., Young, D., and Zelesnik, G. 1995. Abstractions for software architecture and tools to support them. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

Digital Library

[19]

Shaw, M. and Garlan, D. 1996. Software Architecture: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline. Prentice-Hall.

Digital Library

[20]

Smith, C. and Williams, L. 1993. Software performance engineering: A case study including performance comparison with design alternatives. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 19(7):720-741.

Digital Library

[21]

Software Emancipation, http://www.setech.com

[22]

Stonebraker, M., Rowe, L., and Hirohama, M. 1990. The implementation of POSTGRES. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2(1):125-141.

Digital Library

[23]

Tonella, P., Fiutem, R., Antoniol, G., and Merlo, E. 1996. Augmenting pattern-based architectural recovery with flow analysis: Mosaic--A case study. Proceedings of the 3rd Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, Monterey, CA, pp. 198-207.

Digital Library

[24]

UIMS Tool Developers Workshop, 1992. A metamodel for the runtime architecture of an interactive system. SIGCHI Bulletin, 24(1):32-37.

Digital Library

[25]

Wall, L. and Schwartz, R. 1991. Programming Perl. O'Reilly & Associates.

Digital Library

[26]

Wong, K., Tilley, S., Müller, H., and Storey, M. 1994. Programmable reverse engineering. International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, 4(4):501-520.

[27]

Yeh, A., Harris, D., and Chase, M. 1997. Manipulating recovered software architecture views. Proceedings of ICSE 19, Boston, MA, pp. 184-194.

Digital Library

Cited By

Ammermann JJordan SLinsbauer LSchaefer I(2023)A Query Language for Software Architecture InformationSoftware Architecture10.1007/978-3-031-42592-9_23(337-345)Online publication date: 18-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-42592-9_23
Eden AGasparis ENicholson JKazman R(2018)Round-trip engineering with the Two-Tier Programming ToolkitSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-017-9363-926:2(249-271)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11219-017-9363-9
Tamburri DKazman R(2018)General methods for software architecture recovery: a potential approach and its evaluationEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-017-9543-z23:3(1457-1489)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-017-9543-z
Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Requirements for Integrating Software Architecture and Reengineering Models: CORUM II
WCRE '98: Proceedings of the Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE'98)

This paper discusses the requirements and a generic framework for the integration of architectural and code-based reengineering tools. This framework is needed because there are a large number of stand-alone reengineering tools that operate at different ...
Maintaining a legacy: towards support at the architectural level
An Approach and Toolset to Semi-automatically Recover and Visualise Micro-Service Architecture
Software Architecture. ECSA 2023 Tracks, Workshops, and Doctoral Symposium
Abstract
This paper presents the MicroService Architecture Recovery (MiSAR) toolset for software engineers (software architects and developers) that need to semi-automatically obtain as-implemented architectural models of existing microservice-based ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Automated Software Engineering

Automated Software Engineering Volume 6, Issue 2

April 1999

98 pages

ISSN:0928-8910

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © Copyright © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Publisher

Kluwer Academic Publishers

United States

Publication History

Published: 01 April 1999

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

41
Total Citations
View Citations
0
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)0
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 24 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Ammermann JJordan SLinsbauer LSchaefer I(2023)A Query Language for Software Architecture InformationSoftware Architecture10.1007/978-3-031-42592-9_23(337-345)Online publication date: 18-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-42592-9_23
Eden AGasparis ENicholson JKazman R(2018)Round-trip engineering with the Two-Tier Programming ToolkitSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-017-9363-926:2(249-271)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11219-017-9363-9
Tamburri DKazman R(2018)General methods for software architecture recovery: a potential approach and its evaluationEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-017-9543-z23:3(1457-1489)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-017-9543-z
Wille DWehling KSeidl CPluchator MSchaefer I(2017)Variability Mining of Technical ArchitecturesProceedings of the 21st International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A10.1145/3106195.3106202(39-48)Online publication date: 25-Sep-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3106195.3106202
Xiao LCai YKazman RMo RFeng QDillon LVisser WWilliams L(2016)Identifying and quantifying architectural debtProceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/2884781.2884822(488-498)Online publication date: 14-May-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2884781.2884822
Mirakhorli MCleland-Huang J(2016)Detecting, Tracing, and Monitoring Architectural Tactics in CodeIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2015.247921742:3(205-220)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2015.2479217
Kazman RGoldenson DMonarch INichols WValetto G(2016)Evaluating the Effects of Architectural Documentation: A Case Study of a Large Scale Open Source ProjectIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2015.246538742:3(220-260)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2015.2465387
Koziolek HGoldschmidt TGooijer TDomis DSehestedt SGamer TAleksy M(2016)Assessing software product line potentialEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-014-9358-021:2(411-448)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-014-9358-0
Zapalowski VNunes INunes DRoy CBegel AMoonen L(2014)Revealing the relationship between architectural elements and source code characteristicsProceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1145/2597008.2597156(14-25)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2597008.2597156
Ilk NZhao JGoes PHofmann P(2011)Semantic enrichment processInformation Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-010-9286-513:3(359-370)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10796-010-9286-5
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents