Comparing Software Architecture Recovery Techniques Using Accurate Dependencies

Abstract

Abstract-Many techniques have been proposed to automatically recover software architectures from software implementations. A thorough comparison among the recovery techniques is needed to understand their effectiveness and applicability. This study improves on previous studies in two ways.First, we study the impact of leveraging more accurate symbol dependencies on the accuracy of architecture recovery techniques. Previous studies have not seriously considered how the quality of the input might affect the quality of the output for architecture recovery techniques.Second, we study a system (Chromium) that is substantially larger (9.7 million lines of code) than those included in previous studies. Obtaining the ground-truth architecture of Chromium involved two years of collaboration with its developers. As part of this work we developed a new submodule-based technique to recover preliminary versions of ground-truth architectures.The other systems that we study have been examined previously. In some cases, we have updated the ground-truth architectures to newer versions, and in other cases we have corrected newly discovered inconsistencies.Our evaluation of nine variants of six state-of-the-art architecture recovery techniques shows that symbol dependencies generally produce architectures with higher accuracies than include dependencies. Despite this improvement, the overall accuracy is low for all recovery techniques. The results suggest that (1) in addition to architecture recovery techniques, the accuracy of dependencies used as their inputs is another factor to consider for high recovery accuracy, and (2) more accurate recovery techniques are needed.Our results show that some of the studied architecture recovery techniques scale to the 10M lines-of-code range (the size of Chromium), whereas others do not.

An Empirical Study of Architectural Change in Open-Source Software Systems

“…These two metrics have been recently used in a study of the impact of the granularity of module dependencies on the quality of architecture recovery [25]. We will also describe a metric, c2c [15], because it enables the computation of cvg.…”

The Value of Software Architecture Recovery for Maintenance

“…To the extent that we can show that some or all of these conditions are not satisfied, a given recovery method will be of limited use for the purposes of incremental development. We have therefore for the first time studied how several available recovery methods that have been used for studies such as [13], [22], [19] and [3] measure up against the criteria listed above. We have not directly measured their accuracy but instead addressed the utility of "ground truth" architectures.…”

Adaptive Weighting of Structural Dependency and Textual Similarity in Software Architecture Recovery

“…Their scheme is based on both structural and semantic coupling metrics, which are based on the number of method invocations and the cosine similarity between classes, respectively. Lutellier et al [16] emphasized that quality of dependencies may affect the accuracy of the architecture recovery result.…”