Architecture Recovery

Software product lines are rarely developed from scratch. Instead the development of a product line by reengineering existing systems is a more common scenario, which relies on the collaboration of diverse stakeholders to lay its foundations. The paper describes a collaborative scoping approach for organizations migrating existing products to a product line. The approach uses established practices from the field of reengineering and architectural recovery and synthesizes them in a collaborative process. The proposed approach employs best practices and tools from the area of collaboration engineering to achieve effective collaboration. The paper presents a case study as initial validation of the proposed approach.

Modern software development methodologies include reuse of open source code. Reuse can be facilitated by architectural knowledge of the software, not necessarily provided in the documentation of open source software. The effort required to comprehend the system's source code and discover its architecture can be considered a major drawback in reuse. In a recent study we examined the correlations between design metrics and classes' architecture layer. In this paper, we apply our methodology in more open source projects to verify the applicability of our method. Keywords: system understanding; program comprehension; object-oriented; reuse; architecture layer; design metrics;

The analysis and understanding of processes of decay, in the case of historical buildings and monumental architecture, call for an interpretative overview encompassing data which stem from different areas of study but are globally interrelated and constitute essential elements for the purpose of assessing the state of preservation. ARKIS - Architecture Recovery Knowledge Information System - is an Information System

In this paper we present an approach of assistance at the evolution of the software based on an integrated model of representation of the various software artefacts founded on the typed and attributed graphs as well as a representation of these graphs using GXL (eXtensible Graph Language) a language for structuring hyperdocuments. The hyperdocuments GXL are used to facilitate the interoperability of the tools intended to represent and handle various aspects of the software evolution. We also use the graph rewriting systems for a simple and flexible implementation of mechanisms requiring of the capacities of reasoning for the management of the evolution. Our approach is illustrated by two experiments that we realized on the recovery of applications developed according to multi-tiered architecture Java J2EE and on the management of the change impact of these applications.

Both architecture recovery and architecture evaluation play an important role in the area of software reverse-engineering. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a framework for incremental and iterative application of automated architecture recovery (using SWAG Kit) and architecture analysis (using SAAM.) We conclude that SWAG Kit helps in generating a low-level architecture that forms the basis of analysis, while SAAM helps in deriving from this a deeply understood conceptual architecture. The process is iterative, where SAAM analysis helps refine the parameters fed to SWAG Kit, in turn leading to a superior architecture for further analysis. We have applied this process to the extraction of the architectures of three open source compression tools, and we report on the strengths and weaknesses of the approach that this case study exposed. Over all, we conclude that the framework allowed us to understand the software architectures more deeply than would have been possible with the software architecture recovery process alone.

Software fixes, patches and updates are issued periodically to extend the functional life cycle of software products. In order to facilitate the prompt notification, delivery, and installation of updates, the software industry has responded with update and patch management systems. Because of the proprietary nature of these systems, improvement efforts by academic researchers are greatly restricted. One solution to increasing