Using Interconnection Style Rules to Infer Software Architecture Relations

Brian S. Mitchell, Spiros Mancoridis, and Martin Traverso

Abstract. Software design techniques emphasize the use of abstractions to help developers deal with the complexity of constructing large and complex systems. These abstractions can also be used to guide programmers through a variety of maintenance, reengineering and enhancement activities. Unfortunately, recovering design abstractions directly from a system’s implementation is a difficult task because the source code does not contain them. In this paper we describe an automatic process to infer architectural-level abstractions from the source code. The first step uses software clustering to aggregate the system’s modules into abstract containers called subsystems. The second step takes the output of the clustering process, and infers architectural-level relations based on formal style rules that are specified visually. This two step process has been implemented using a set of integrated tools that employ search techniques to locate good solutions to both the clustering and the relationship inferencing problem quickly. The paper concludes with a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of our process and tools.

LNCS 3103, p. 1375 ff.

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