Architecture Reconstruction in the Dark

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Architecture Reconstruction in the Dark

• Andrew Trevors and Michael Godfrey
• Software Architecture Group (SWAG)
• University of Waterloo

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Architecture reconstruction?

• Background
• Legacy system, older, lots of code, lots of
  evolution,
• but its a significant corporate asset
• Want to recover high-level design models from
  different points of view
• Used to aid system understanding, architectural
  refactoring, informed future evolution,

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Architecture reconstruction?

• Our particular religion
• Extract source model
• A ER model of the external declaration-level
  source code entities of the system
• e.g., fcns, classes, global vars, files,
  interfaces,
• plus calls, refs, defines, implements,
• Create system containment tree model
• Leaves are source code entities
• Internal nodes are subsystems, root is the
  system
• Lift/abstract/define new relationships between
  internal nodes based (at least in part) on
  relationships between leaves.

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Architecture reconstruction?
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in the dark?

• Character is what you are in the dark.
• Dr. Emilio Lizardo
• When trying to perform architecture recovery,
  imperfect knowledge is the rule not the
  exception.
• Open research question
• How much of the fundamental characteristics of a
  systems design and architecture can be bumped
  into or otherwise intuited without much
  fore-knowledge?

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in the dark?

• How far can we push this idea?
• Whats the most you can say given the least
  amount of information?
• What is extreme architecture recovery? ?
• More open questions
• Which artifacts and processes are the most useful
  in extracting architecture models?
• How well do Chinese room techniques work?
• Given limited access to experts, when do you get
  the most bang for the buck?

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LPOTS