Practice Patterns for Architecture Reconstruction

Architecture reconstruction embodies benefits for commercial organizations. Reconstructing or recovering the architecture of software systems is primarily driven by the increased awareness of software architectures as a blueprint for systems and the resulting central role of architectures in development paradigms, like software product lines and component-based systems. This is especially the case for organizations that consciously want to migrate towards software architectures paradigms and enforce them in their software development life-cycle. This paper introduces practice patterns for architecture reconstruction, which offer common problem/solution pairs to strategically apply architecture reconstruction at commercial organizations. Based on an investigation of already developed and presented reconstruction approaches, the paper describes deficiencies that have been uncovered in several practice pattern’s solution space and proposes improvements.