Decentralized Software Architecture Discovery in Distributed Systems

Software architecture discovery plays an increasingly important role in the evolution, maintenance, and runtime self-adaptation of modern software systems whose architecture may have become outdated or may not have previously existed. However, current approaches to architecture discovery take a centralized approach, in which the process is carried out from a single location. This proves inadequate in the case of large distributed systems which, due to size, consist of nodes that are disparately located and are highly dynamic in nature. This report presents DeSARM: Decentralized Software Architecture discoveRy Mechanism, a completely decentralized and automated approach for software architecture discovery of distributed systems based on gossiping and message tracing. Through message tracing, the technique is able to identify important architectural characteristics such as components and connectors, in addition to synchronous and asynchronous communication patterns. Furthermore, through its use of gossiping, it exhibits the properties of scalability, global consistency among participating nodes, self-organization, and resiliency to failures. The report discusses DeSARM’s architecture and detailed design and demonstrates its properties through an analysis of small and large-scale experiments.