A Semi-Automated Approach to the Recovery of SOA System Structure from Low-Level Artifacts

Design recovery is often necessary for Software Engineers trying to manage and maintain complex software systems. The emergence of Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) creates new difficulties for design recovery. This article describes an approach to the use of a particular type of conceptual modeling that has been called knowledge modeling to support design recovery from SOA composite applications. The approach uses a prototype tool called CARET to automate the recovery of basic architectural structure from low level SOA descriptions such as BPELs, WSDLs and XML Schemas. CARET is used with the freely available CmapTools to produce graphical representations called concept maps which may either be used directly or further enhanced through a knowledge elicitation effort with system experts. Two case studies are presented. The first illustrates basic system structure recovery of a composite application. The second illustrates automated recovery augmented with knowledge elicitation for a large-scale SOA system.