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Recovery of Architectural Structure: A Case Study

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Development and Evolution of Software Architectures for Product Families (ARES 1998)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1429))

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Abstract

Industrial software development is often an evolutionary process. Software products are developed for one specific customer and later on refined for other customers with different requirements in terms of a product family. Refinements happen at the implementation level (algorithms and data structures) and on the architectural level (the overall system structure). Recovery of architectural information is necessary to build up a complete and unambiguous description of the architecture of a system. In this paper, we describe an approach for the recovery of architectural structure that focuses on component and connector identification. We describe different strategies to define components and connectors of the system. The examples given in the paper were developed out of an industrial case study, a real-time Train Control System. The recovered architectural description allows reasoning about the quality of the system architecture: The description of the architectural structure revealed hardware-dependent components that in case of a hardware change would have to be changed completely. Therefore, our investigations showed that such a recovery of architectural structure is important to reduce future efforts in the development and maintenance of product lines.

The architecture recovery process discussed in this paper is research work within the ESPRIT project ARES (Architectural Reasoning for Embedded Systems). ARES is supported by the European Commission under ESPRIT framework IV contract no. 20477.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ABB Corporate Research, N-1361, Billingstad, Bergerveien 12

    Wolfgang Eixelsberger, Manfred Kalan, Michaela Ogris & Håkon Beckman

  2. Distributed Systems Group, Vienna University of Technology, A-1040, Vienna, Argentinierstrasse 8/184-1

    Berndt Bellay & Harald Gall

Authors
  1. Wolfgang Eixelsberger
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  2. Manfred Kalan
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  3. Michaela Ogris
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  4. Håkon Beckman
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  5. Berndt Bellay
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  6. Harald Gall
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Philips Research Laboratories, Prof. Holstlaan 4, 5656 AA, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Frank van der Linden

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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Eixelsberger, W., Kalan, M., Ogris, M., Beckman, H., Bellay, B., Gall, H. (1998). Recovery of Architectural Structure: A Case Study. In: van der Linden, F. (eds) Development and Evolution of Software Architectures for Product Families. ARES 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1429. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-68383-6_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-68383-6_14

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-64916-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68383-4

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