Architectural Element Matching Using Concept Analysis

A large portion of software development effort is focused on modification and evolution of existing software systems. To feed forward-engineering and design activities, analysts must first recover and synthesize a complete and consistent set of architectural representations. Architectural Synthesis is one method to build this representation. During the Architectural Synthesis of a software system, an analyst must combine information derived from a variety of sources (which we call perspectives). This combination process requires the analyst to make decisions about which elements in the perspectives denote the same underlying parts of the software system. We present an automated technique for matching these elements based upon a mathematical technique called concept analysis. This technique constructs a spectrum of matching relations using a lattice of concepts drawn from the perspectives and descriptive information about the system's application domain. The results show the promise of using concept analysis to match elements and aid in synthesizing a large number of perspectives.