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General methods for software architecture recovery: a potential approach and its evaluation

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Abstract

Software architecture is a critical artefact in the software lifecycle. It is a system blueprint for construction, it aids in planning teaming and division of work, and it aids in reasoning about system properties. But architecture documentation is seldom created and, even when it is initially created, it is seldom maintained. For these reasons organisations often feel the need to recover legacy architectures, for example, as part of planning for evolution or cloud migration. But there is no existing general architecture recovery approach nor tool that can be applied to any type of system, under any condition. We will show that one way of achieving such generality is to apply systematic code inspection following a Grounded Theory (GT) approach. Though relatively costly and human-intensive, a GT-based approach has several merits, for example: (a) it is general by design; (b) it can be partially automated; (c) it yields evidence-based results rooted of the system being examined. This article presents one theoretical formulation of a general architecture recovery method–called REM–and reports on the evaluation of REM in the context of a large architecture recovery campaign performed for the European Space Agency. Our results illustrate some intriguing properties and opportunities of GT-based architecture recovery approaches and point out lessons learned and venues for further research.

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Notes

  1. http://icse2017.gatech.edu/

  2. http://www.softwarearchitecture.org

  3. http://ecsa2016.iku.edu.tr

  4. http://www.remics.eu/

  5. http://artist-project.eu/

  6. http://tinyurl.com/of65un2

  7. http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Operations/gse/MICONYS

  8. http://tinyurl.com/q8rb8na

  9. http://www.codingthearchitecture.com/

  10. http://www.omg.org/spec/QVT/

  11. A number of other auxiliary model-transformations were devised but their structure and application is not discussed here for the sake of space.

  12. http://ant.apache.org/

  13. Further references on model transformations are available here: http://tinyurl.com/q8rb8na.

  14. Component and class names have been changed to avoid disclosure of protected information.

  15. http://tinyurl.com/jl39tec

  16. https://eclipse.org/modelling/m2t/?project=jet

  17. http://tinyurl.com/j8x3pux

  18. http://tinyurl.com/lf876f7

  19. The authors shall be informed of every study-replication effort, so that ESA stakeholders may be involved if needed.

  20. http://www.esa.int/TEC/Software_engineering_and_standardisation/TECA5CUXBQE_0.html

  21. http://www.ares-nest.org/tiki-index.php

  22. https://eclipse.org/MoDisco/

  23. http://www.terma.de

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the precious comments we received from the anonymous reviewers - they helped greatly in structuring the value and contributions in this manuscript. This research has been conducted in collaboration with TERMA GmbHFootnote 23 as an ESA GSTP study founded by ESA under contract 20645/07/F/VS. The author would like to thank Drs. Gert Villemos, Antonio Bianco and Henry Muccini for support during RTE. Damian’s work is partially supported by the European Commission grant no. 644869 (H2020 - Call 1), DICE.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Politecnico Di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Damian A. Tamburri

  2. University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, USA

    Rick Kazman

  3. Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Rick Kazman

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  1. Damian A. Tamburri
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  2. Rick Kazman
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Correspondence to Damian A. Tamburri.

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Communicated by: Martin Robillard

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Tamburri, D.A., Kazman, R. General methods for software architecture recovery: a potential approach and its evaluation. Empir Software Eng 23, 1457–1489 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-017-9543-z

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