Towards the combination of clustering-based and pattern-based reverse engineering approaches

Abstract

Reverse Engineering, i.e. the analysis of software for the purpose of recovering its design documentation, e.g. in form of the conceptual architecture, is an important area of software engineering. Today, two prevalent reverse engineering approaches have emerged: (1) the clustering-based approach which tries to analyze a given software system by grouping its elements based on metric values to provide the reverse engineer with an overview of the system and (2) the pattern-based approach which tries to detect predefined structural patterns in the software which can give insight about the original developers' intentions. These approaches operate on different levels of abstraction and have specific strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, we sketch an approach towards combining these techniques which can remove some of the specific shortcomings.