Tool support for just-in-time architecture reconstruction and evaluation: an experience report

The need for software architecture evaluation has drawn considerable attention in recent years. In practice, this is a challenging exercise for two main reasons. First, in deployed projects, software architecture documentation is often not readily available, and may not be a correct representation of the as built architecture. Second, large software systems have numerous potential views of the various architecturally significant structures in the system. In this paper we assess the capabilities of software reverse engineering and architecture reconstruction tools to support just-in-time architecture reconstruction. If an application's architecture can be reconstructed efficiently, this could promote more effective architecture reviews and evaluations. We describe our experiences in leveraging multiple reconstruction tools and how these guided the choice of design artifacts to construct. We discovered that the tools complemented each other in identifying reconstruction scope, crit...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Ian Gorton, Liming Zhu
• Keywords: ICSE 2005, Keywords Software Architecture, Software Architecture Documentation, Software Architecture Evaluation, Software Engineering