Architecture recovery in ARES

Abstract

Recovering the architecture of legacy systems requires more than just reverse engineering tools to generate some higher-level descriptions of the system under study. Design decisions and logical groupings of functions have to be balanced with informal domain knowledge, domain standards and coding guidelines of the developers. Therefore, we combine domain aspects with coding aspects and use reverse engineering tools as one means of recovering the requested information to reason about the underlying architecture of the system. This reasoning is an alternating top-down and bottom-up approach. The architecture recovery process we introduce is one part of the ESPRIT project ARES (Architectural Reasoning for Embedded Systems).