Architekturerkennung aus Quellcode? - Möglichkeiten und Grenzen anhand einer Fallstudie

Abstract

The source code is the only really true structure in a software system's life cycle, let it be excellent or poor. Its structure-in-the-large, the architecture, is its most important technical artefact. Programming languages have no syntactical elements to express architectural structures like components or connections. Therefore architectural recovery is one of the most interesting topics in the reengineering area. The source code is parsed to find different views of the architecture in order to judge its maintainability. That's why architectural recovery is a very important topic also for software management purposes. We investigated a large component of a 1 million lines C++ system, which is in operation since 1,5 years. We show what can be detected in the code and how it can be done under real life conditions.