Software system understanding via architectural views extraction according to multiple viewpoints

Abstract

Changes and evolution of software systems constantly generate new challenges for the recovery of software systems architectures. A system's architecture, together with its elements and the way they interact, constitute valuable assets for understanding the system. We believe that offering multiple architectural views of a given system, using domain and pattern knowledge enhance understanding of the software system as a whole. To correlate different sources of information and existing software system, different viewpoints are considered. Viewpoints enable one to model such information and guide the extraction algorithms to extract multiple architectural views. We propose a recursive framework, an approach that expresses different kinds of information as viewpoints to guide the extraction process. These multiple viewpoints models improve the consideration of architectural, conceptual, and structural aspects of the system. © Springer-Verlag 2009.