Bridging the Concrete and Logical Domains for Software Architecture Reconstruction

Software architecture reconstruction is essentially the process of creating a set of architectural views with the information recovered from the actual implementation of a software system. While recovering the basic facts about the implementation can be automated with source code analyzers, mapping them to logical concepts is mainly a conceptual activity. We investigate the problem of how to bridge the logical and concrete domains for the purpose of creating architectural views. Our conclusion is that there is still a considerable gap between the theoretical framework and the practical experiences. This hinders the possibility of developing a general, rigorous and effective architecture reconstruction method.