Reengineering of Component-Based Software Systems in the Presence of Design Deficiencies – An Overview

Abstract

In reengineering, up-to-date architecture models are important artifacts to get an overview of a system and to plan and execute the necessary reengineering activities. If such models do not exist, software architecture reconstruction (SAR) techniques can be used to recover them from the system's source code. However, design deficiencies like Interface Violations can influence the architecture reconstruction and thereby adulterate the recovered architecture. This is currently not addressed by SAR approaches. Archimetrix is an iterative reengineering process that was developed in a PhD thesis at the University of Paderborn [5]. It aims at detecting and removing design deficiencies which influence the architecture reconstruction and thereby enable the recovery of more accurate architecture models.

Reengineering component-based software systems with Archimetrix

“…We showed in our previous work that the presence of design deficiencies in the code can influence the metric values and therefore the clustering results [58,59]. The CTT Metric introduced in this section identifies components for whom one of the aggregated metric values was close to the merging or composition threshold, i.e., the metric value was just high enough to merge or compose the component candidate (or just low enough to discard it, respectively).…”

“…For example, for the design deficiency Interface Violation [59], the metrics Class Locations, Number of External Accesses, and High Interface Adherence are used. These metrics are explained in detail in [41,58].…”

“…In contrast to them, this paper describes additional relevant process steps (e.g., for extending Archimetrix with new deficiency formalizations), an extended evaluation taking additional systems and implementations into account, and a deep and systematic-related work survey. At the same time, the paper summarizes a PhD thesis on this topic [58].…”