Empirical Study on the Effect of a Software Architecture Representation's Abstraction Level on the Architecture-Level Software Understanding

Architectural component models represent high level designs and are frequently used as a central view of architectural descriptions of software systems. In this paper we present a study that examines the effect of the level of abstraction of the software architecture representation on the architecture-level understand ability of a software system. Three architectural representations of the same software system that differ in the level of abstraction (and hence in the number of components used in the architecture) are studied. Our results show that an architecture at the abstraction level that is sufficient to adequately maps the system's relevant functionalities to the corresponding architectural components (i.e., each component in the architecture corresponds to one system's relevant functionality) significantly improves the architecture-level understanding of the software system, as compared to two other architectures that have a low and a high number of elements and hence tangles or scatters the system's relevant functionalities into several architectural components.