Behavior-Based Architecture Reconstruction and Conformance Checking

Abstract

The reconstruction of software architectures and the evaluation of architecture conformance of software systems is a long-studied research topic. Although up-to-date architecture descriptions are necessary to understand and evolve systems, they are rarely available. Consequently, many software architecture reconstruction approaches and tools have been proposed. Despite this, software architects still do not extensively employ these tools and suffer from negative effects when relying only on outdated descriptions. In this paper we present ARAMIS, an approach and associated toolbox that aims to support the behavior-based reconstruction of up-to-date architecture descriptions based on the correction of possibly outdated prescriptive ones. Additionally, ARAMIS addresses the so-called meta-model incompatibility problem by allowing architects to use their own architecture description language instead of the one that the reconstruction tool requires. ARAMIS checks the behavior-based architecture conformance of a system based on pre-specified communication rules, derives up-to-date descriptions and enables their exploration. We have evaluated ARAMIS during several combined surveys and interviews with subjects from both the industry and academia and have obtained positive results.