Software Architecture Recovery with Information Fusion
Yiran Zhang, Zhengzi Xu, Chengwei Liu, Hongxu Chen, Jianwen Sun, Dong Qiu, Yang Liu
Abstract
Understanding the architecture is vital for effectively maintaining and managing large software systems. However, as software systems evolve over time, their architectures inevitably change. To keep up with the change, architects need to track the implementation-level changes and update the architectural documentation accordingly, which is time-consuming and error-prone. Therefore, many automatic architecture recovery techniques have been proposed to ease this process. Despite efforts have been made to improve the accuracy of architecture recovery, existing solutions still suffer from two limitations. First, most of them only use one or two type of information for the recovery, ignoring the potential usefulness of other sources. Second, they tend to use the information in a coarse-grained manner, overlooking important details within it.