An Architecture for Toolbox-based Software Architecture Reconstruction Solutions

Abstract

Although up-to-date architecture views outstandingly aid the understanding, meaningful evolution and evaluation of software systems, software architecture reconstruction tools are still not broadly employed in the industry. While this situation might seem contradictory, we have identified - based on our experience with two industry cooperation partners - some important improvement potentials that could increase the usefulness of the current state of the art reconstruction approaches and thus lead to a better industry acceptance. In this paper we present a general architecture for constructing tool-box-based software architecture reconstruction solutions that enable the flexible integration of various analysis plug-ins on a per need basis while addressing the improvement directions identified earlier. Furthermore, we present an instantiation of this architecture that enables the reconstruction of architecture behavior views on more abstraction levels. We conclude the paper with a tool implementation overview of the latter architecture.