Domain-Driven Analysis of Architecture Reconstruction Methods

Software architecture reconstruction (SAR) is a process which aims to obtain the architecture information of any system using various sources. These sources contain documentations, logs, codes, and stakeholder concerns. Various automated and manual approaches have been proposed in the literature for SAR. Manual architecture reconstruction is usually time consuming, costly, error-prone, and complex. Hence different studies have addressed these problems by proposing automatized methods and tools for SAR. In this chapter we present a systematic characterization of the published architecture reconstruction methods. We apply a domain analysis process in which we first define the generic domain model of architecture reconstruction. The model is represented as a set of key terms, a generic business process model, and a feature diagram that represents the common and variant features of architecture reconstruction. We also present the method for deriving concrete architecture reconstruction methods from the generic domain model. We illustrate our approach for deriving two different concrete architecture reconstruction methods.