A quality-based analysis of architecture recovery environments

Architecture recovery is a recent research area which aims at providing reverse engineering technologies to extract high-level architectural information from the source code of legacy systems. The authors review the main (only?) architecture recovery environments proposed thus far. The environments are analysed with respect to different quality attributes, and their features and limitations are discussed. This allows one to highlight problems yet to be addressed in the area and, for some of them, suggest possible alternatives. They believe that this analysis is useful for the design of more effective architecture recovery tools.