Software Architecture Recovery Contents 1 Software Architecture Recovery 1 2 Architectural Design Recovery Using Data Mining Techniques 17 a Reverse Engineering and System Analysis 33 B Aql Language Design 45 Chapter 1 Software Architecture Recovery 1.1 Introduction

Software architectural recovery encompasses various methods for extracting architectural information from some lower level representations of a software system such as source code. Architectural recovery is a two-phase process namely extraction, and analysis 64]. The existing approaches focus on recovering restricted information about the system based on: rela-tional queries 66, 87], interactions between les 33], visualization of the system's structure, and architectural styles 48, 34]. Despite several attempts for automating the architectural recovery process (i.e., clustering), still few approaches and tools exist 89]. It is rather impossible to deene the architecture of a large system at once, hence, the architectural recovery is a gradual process. Software systems usually consist of common patterns in their design which are the basis for the recovery process. Most recovery processes focus on the structural properties of a system, ignoring other important aspects of a software such as high-level behavioral. Therefore, the architectural recovery problem deals with: devising the necessary methodology and tools for incrementally recovering a system's high-level properties from its lower level representations using domain knowledge and pattern matching. 1.2 Structured query-based software architecture recovery We aim at designing the necessary processes, tools, and methods, that enable us to analyze a large software system in order to recover and document the system's structural and behavioral views. We specially focus on devising methods that allow us for multiple-view user query and approximate pattern matching for the recovery of control and data ow dependencies. Figure 1.1 illustrates the adopted approach of a cooperative architectural recovery environment. A brief description of the recovery process is provided in the caption of the gure.