ART: An architectural reverse engineering environment

When programmers perform maintenance tasks, program understanding is often required. One of the first activities in understanding a software system is identifying its subsystems and their relations, i.e., its software archite cture. Since a large part of the effort is spent in creating a mental model of the system under study, tools can help maintainers in managing the evol ution of legacy systems by showing them architectural information. This paper describes an environment for the architectural recovery of softw are systems called the architectural recovery tool (ART), The environment i s based on a hierarchical architectural model that drives the application o f a set of recognizers, each producing a different architectural view of a system or of some of its parts. Recognizers embody knowledge about architec tural cliches and use how analysis techniques to make their output more acc urate. To test the accuracy and effectiveness of the ART, a suite of public domain applications containing interesting architectural organizations was select ed as a benchmark. Results are presented by showing ART performance in term s of precision and recall of the architectural concept retrieval process. The results obtained show that cliche-based architectural recovery is feasi ble and the recovered information can be valuable support in reengineering and maintenance activities. Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.