Software architecture model driven reverse engineering approach to open source software development

Abstract

Popular Open Source Software (OSS) development platforms like GitHub, Google Code, and Bitbucket take advantage of some best practices of traditional software development like version control and issue tracking. Current major open source software environments, including IDE tools and online code repositories, do not provide support for visual architecture modeling. Research has shown that visual modeling of complex software projects has benefits throughout the software lifecycle. Then why is it that software architecture modeling is so conspicuously missing from popular online open source code repositories? How can including visual documentation improve the overall quality of open source software projects? Our goal is to answer both of these questions and bridge the gap between traditional software engineering best practices and open source development by applying a software architecture documentation methodology using Unified Modeling Language, called 5W1H Re-Doc, on a real open source project for managing identity and access, MITREid Connect. We analyze the effect of a model-driven software engineering approach on collaboration of open source contributors, quality of specification conformance, and state-of-the-art of architecture modeling. Our informal experiment revealed that in some cases, having the visual documentation can significantly increase comprehension of an online OSS project over having only the textual information that currently exists for that project.