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During the software lifecycle, software systems have to be continuously maintained to counteract architectural deterioration and retain their software quality. In order to maintain a software it has to be understood first which can be supported by (semi-)automatic reverse engineering approaches. Reverse engineering is the analysis of software for the purpose of recovering its design documentation, e.g., in form of the conceptual architecture. Today, the most prevalent reverse engineering approaches are (1) the clustering-based approach which groups the elements of a given software system based on metric values in order to provide an overview of the system and (2) the pattern-based approach which tries to detect pre-defined patterns in the software which can give insight about the original developers' intentions. In this paper, we present an approach towards combining these techniques: we show how the detection and removal of certain bad smells in a software system can improve the results of a clustering-based analysis. We propose to integrate this combination of reverse engineering approaches into a reengineering process for component-based software systems.

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Many software development, planning, or analysis tasks require an up-to-date software architecture documentation. However, this documentation is often outdated, unavailable, or at least not available as a formal model which analysis tools could use. Reverse engineering methods try to fill this gap. However, as they process the system's source code, they are easily misled by design deficiencies (e.g., violations of component encapsulation) which leaked into the code during the system's evolution. Despite the high impact of design deficiencies on the quality of the resulting software architecture models, none of the surveyed related works is able to cope with them during the reverse engineering process. Therefore, we have developed the Archimetrix approach which semiautomatically recovers the system's concrete architecture in a formal model while simultaneously detecting and removing design deficiencies. We have validated Archimetrix on a case study system and two implementation variants of the CoCoME benchmark system. Results show that the removal of relevant design deficiencies leads to an architecture model which more closely matches the system's conceptual architecture.

Maintaining software systems requires up-to-date models of these systems to systematically plan, analyse and execute the necessary reengineering steps. Often, no or only outdated models of such systems exist. Thus, a reverse engineering step is needed that recovers the system's components, subsystems and connectors. However, reverse engineering methods are severely impacted by design deficiencies in the system's code base, e.g., they lead to wrong component structures. Several approaches exist today for the reverse engineering of component-based systems, however, none of them explicitly integrates a systematic design deficiency removal into the process to improve the quality of the reverse engineered architecture. Therefore, in our Archimetrix approach, we propose to regard the most relevant deficiencies with respect to the reverse engineered component-based architecture and support reengineers by presenting the architectural consequences of removing a given deficiency. We validate our approach on the Common Component Modeling Example and show that we are able to identify relevant deficiencies and that their removal leads to an improved reengineered architecture.