Archimetrix: Improved Software Architecture Recovery in the Presence of Design Deficiencies

Maintaining software systems requires up-to-date models of these systems to systematically plan, analyse and execute the necessary reengineering steps. Often, no or only outdated models of such systems exist. Thus, a reverse engineering step is needed that recovers the system's components, subsystems and connectors. However, reverse engineering methods are severely impacted by design deficiencies in the system's code base, e.g., they lead to wrong component structures. Several approaches exist today for the reverse engineering of component-based systems, however, none of them explicitly integrates a systematic design deficiency removal into the process to improve the quality of the reverse engineered architecture. Therefore, in our Archimetrix approach, we propose to regard the most relevant deficiencies with respect to the reverse engineered component-based architecture and support reengineers by presenting the architectural consequences of removing a given deficiency. We validate our approach on the Common Component Modeling Example and show that we are able to identify relevant deficiencies and that their removal leads to an improved reengineered architecture.