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On the Automatic Recovery of Style-Specific Architectural Relations in Software Systems

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Abstract

The cost of maintaining a software system over a long period of time far exceeds its initial development cost. Much of the maintenance cost is attributed to the time required by new developers to understand legacy systems. High-level structural information helps maintainers navigate through the numerous low-level components and relations present in the source code. Modularization tools can be used to produce subsystem decompositions from the source code but do not typically produce high-level architectural relations between the newly found subsystems. Controlling subsystem interactions is one important way in which the overall complexity of software maintenance can be reduced.

We have developed a tool, called ARIS (Architecture Relation Inference System), that enables software engineers to define rules and relations for regulating subsystem interactions. These rules and relations are called Interconnection Styles and are definedusing a visual notation. The style definition is used by our tool to infer subsystem-level relations in designs being reverse engineered from source code.

In this paper we describe our tool and its underlying techniques and algorithms. Using a case study, we describe how ARIS is used to reverse engineer high-level structural information from a real application.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Martin Traverso & Spiros Mancoridis

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  1. Martin Traverso
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  2. Spiros Mancoridis
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Traverso, M., Mancoridis, S. On the Automatic Recovery of Style-Specific Architectural Relations in Software Systems. Automated Software Engineering 9, 331–360 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020346626363

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