A FRAMEWORK FOR TOOL-BASED SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE RECONSTRUCTION

Abstract

For software with nontrivial size and complexity, it is not feasible to manually perform architecture reconstruction. Therefore it is essential for the software architecture miner who is mining architecture from the existing software to have a well-defined software architecture reconstruction process that helps incorporate as much tool use as possible at the appropriate steps of architecture reconstruction. There are some existing software architecture reconstruction frameworks but they do not provide guidelines on how to systematically utilize tools to produce architecture views for a reconstruction purpose. In this paper, we propose a framework for tool-based software architecture reconstruction. This framework consists of a generic process for software architecture reconstruction and the steps to derive from it a concrete tool-based process to be used for actual architecture reconstruction. The architecture miner can use this framework to analyze source code for modifying source code as well as to reconstruct software architecture from source code.