A Systematic Method for Architecture Recovery

Abstract

Software architecture recovery aims to reverse engineer a software architecture description from the system artifacts (e.g. source code) in order to facilitate software architecture analysis, improvement and control. Whilst there are a number of software architecture recovery methods, none of the current methods focus purely on those aspects of a system which address non-functional requirements. This paper introduces the Systematic Method for Software Architecture Recovery (SyMAR). SyMAR is an inspection method used to recover a software architecture description consistent with the view of a software architecture providing a specification of a software infrastructure addressing non-functional requirements within which application functionality addressing functional requirements can be deployed and executed. The method has been applied to a number of industrial architecture recovery projects. This paper discusses the experiences from these projects and illustrates the method using one of these projects as a case study.