On the automatic recovery of style-specific architectural relations in software systems

The cost of maintaining a software system over a long period of time far exceeds its initial development cost. Much of the maintenance cost is attributed to the time required by new developers to understand legacy systems. High-level structural information helps maintainers navigate through the numerous low-level components and relations present in the source code. Modularization tools can be used to produce subsystem decompositions from the source code but do not typically produce high-level architectural relations between the newly found subsystems. Controlling subsystem interactions is one important way in which the overall complexity of software maintenance can be reduced. We have developed a tool, called ARIS (Architecture Relation Inference System), that enables software engineers to define rules and relations for regulating subsystem interactions. These rules and relations are called Interconnection Styles and are defined using a visual notation. The style definition is used by our tool to infer subsystem-level relations in designs being reverse engineered from source code. In this paper we describe our tool and its underlying techniques and algorithms. Using a case study, we describe how ARIS is used to reverse engineer high-level structural information from a real application.