Playing Detective: Reconstructing Software Architecture from Available Evidence

Because a system's software architecture strongly influences its ability to support quality attributes such as modifiability, performance, and security, it is important to be able to analyze and reason about that architecture. However, architectural documentation frequently does not exist, and when it does, it is often out of sync with the implemented system. In addition, it is rare that software development begins with a clean slate; systems are almost always constrained by existing legacy code. As a consequence, we need to be able to extract information from existing system implementations and reason architecturally about this information. This paper presents Dali, an open, lightweight workbench that aids an analyst in extracting, manipulating, and interpreting architectural information. By assisting in the reconstruction of architectures from extracted information, Dali helps an analyst redocument architectures and discover the relationship between "as-implemented" and "as-designed" architectures.

PDF [443 KB]

Authors

Rick Kazman

Jeromy Carriere

This report is related to the following area(s) of work:

Software Architecture

Technical Report
CMU/SEI-97-TR-010
October 1997

Cite This Report

SEI:

Kazman, Rick; & Carriere, S.. Playing Detective: Reconstructing Software Architecture from Available Evidence (CMU/SEI-97-TR-010). Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 1997. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/97tr010.cfm

IEEE:

R. Kazman, and S. Carriere, "Playing Detective: Reconstructing Software Architecture from Available Evidence," Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Technical Report CMU/SEI-97-TR-010, 1997. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/97tr010.cfm

APA:

Kazman, R., & Carriere, S. (1997). Playing Detective: Reconstructing Software Architecture from Available Evidence (CMU/SEI-97-TR-010). Retrieved May 23, 2013, from the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University website: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/97tr010.cfm

CHI:

Kazman, Rick, and S. Carriere. Playing Detective: Reconstructing Software Architecture from Available Evidence (CMU/SEI-97-TR-010). Pittsburgh, PA: Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 1997. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/97tr010.cfm

MLA:

Kazman, R., & Carriere, S. 1997. Playing Detective: Reconstructing Software Architecture from Available Evidence (Technical Report CMU/SEI-97-TR-010). Pittsburgh: Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/97tr010.cfm

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