Reverse architecting approach for complex systems

Philips is an electronics company which operates world wide and participates in professional as well as consumer markets. The architecture of many software intensive systems are currently not optimally prepared for the changing market. For example, the variety of systems is increasing because different users or user groups demand slightly different variants of a system. Good understanding of systems is required to be able to follow these changes. During the last years we have analysed a number of systems from which we have derived a general approach for reverse architecting (RA). Our approach has proved to be applicable for various complex systems in different domains. It consists of a number of RA steps. We describe three RA steps and indicate some aspects of other RA steps. The description is supplemented with three case studies of complex systems. The complete set of RA steps is not fully independent, however it is not necessary to perform all RA steps for each case