A Software Architecture Reconstruction Method

Changes to a software system during implementation and maintenance can cause the architecture of a system to deviate from its documented architecture. If design documents are to be useful, maintenance programmers must be able to easily evaluate how closely the documents conform to the code they are meant to describe. Software architecture recovery, which deals with the extraction and analysis of a system's architecture, has gained more tool support in the past few years. However, there is little research on developing effective and efficient architectural conformance methods. In particular, given the increasing emphasis on patterns and styles in the software engineering community, a method needs to explicitly aid a user in identifying architectural patterns. This paper presents a semi-automatic method, called ARM (Architecture Reconstruction Method), that guides a user in the reconstruction of software architectures based on the recognition of patterns. Once the system's actual architecture has been reconstructed, we can analyze conformance of the software to the documented design patterns. 1. INTRODUCTION A software architecture is a high-level description of a software system's design, often a model of the software's components (e.g., objects, processes, data repositories, etc.), the externally visible properties of those components, and the relationships among them (Bass, et al., 1998). The concept of software architectures has received considerable attention lately, and developers are starting to document software architectures. However, the living architecture of a software system may drift from the documented