Software architecture recovery using Conway's law

Architectural documentation is recognised as a mechanism for improving software quality and reducing development costs. However, many existing systems do not have any architectural documentation. To obtain the beneets of accurate architectural documentation, research suggests that we use tools to recover the architecture of a system, then continue to use these tools to keep the documentation up to date. This paper describes how the organization of system developers can be extracted and analysed to form an ownership architecture. According to Conway's law, the ownership architecture serves as a predictor of the concrete (as built) architecture, and also provides facts about the location of live design knowledge. To evaluate the usefulness of ownership architectures, we examined three large software systems: Linux 1 (800 KLOC), Mozilla (1.5 MLOC), and a commercial software development system (3.8 MLOC). Experience with these systems indicates that ownership archi-1 Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Tor-valds. Netscape Navigator is a registered trademark of Netscape Communications Corporation. Java is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark, licensed exclusively through X/Open Company Ltd. Other names are properties of their respective owners. tectures can be a powerful addition to a reverse engineering endeavour.