ArchiRev—Reverse engineering of information systems toward ArchiMate models. An industrial case study

Abstract

In the context of digital transformation, companies are increasingly forced to develop, manage and continually align IT and business. Companies have found in Enterprise Architecture (EA) a valuable tool to represent and manage IT and business in a holistic way by establishing connections among technology concerns and business/strategical/motivational ones. EA modelling is one of the most critical tasks in this context to represent accurate models that make the difference in the decision-making and governance processes of the company. In most of the cases, EA models are manually defined by experts which is usually error-prone and time-consuming. Thus, the constant business and IT realignment through manual modelling becomes complex and expensive. This research presents ArchiRev, an extensible reverse engineering method that automate the extraction of EA models (using ArchiMate language) by analysing different information systems artefacts. This proposal has been validated through an industrial case study in the context of a C#-based system of an Italian ship refurbishment company. The study has demonstrated the effectiveness (based in the opinion of some business experts) and efficiency of the method. The main implication is that EA modelling can be accelerated, whereas subjectivity and errors introduced by experts might be reduced.

A method for transforming knowledge discovery metamodel to ArchiMate models

“…The use of this case study also allowed us to compare the generated model with previous generations that were carried out programmatically by means of a java tool that coded the transformation mappings in traditional structured programming. The result of that previous research is found in [ 43 ]. In order to facilitate the replication of this study, all the experimental materials (transformation, metamodels as well as input and output models) are available online [ 3 ].…”

“…As it can be seen in Table 2 , the mappings defined refer to a reduced set of elements from both metamodels, which are based on mappings provided in [ 43 ]. These mappings are based on the source code annotations and their semantics according to some software architectural patterns as well as according to some common coding platforms.…”

“…This is because it is not possible to satisfy the need of human intervention, i.e., experts who know the context and business domain of every system and are able to annotate the ArchiMate models and determine wrong elements (false positives) and missing elements (false negative). This was done in a previous, similar case study [ 43 ]. However, to count with actual experts for open-source systems is no possible and this is the reason for which this is outside of the scope of the case study.…”

Contributions Between Enterprise Architecture and Digital Transformation: A Systematic Literature Review.

“…Apesar do termo ter sido cunhado há décadas, a pesquisa de forma mais intensiva em relação a disciplina é recente. O que foi estimulado pela convergência de outras áreas na arquitetura corporativa, como gestão dos processos de negócios, arquitetura orientada a serviços, transformação digital, entre outras áreas que se relacionam com os objetivos e designações de arquitetura (Pérez-Castillo et al, 2021).…”