Understanding the architecture of software systems

The first activity performed by maintenance programmers when approaching the task of understanding a system is often trying to discover its high level structure, that is identifying its subsystems and their relations: in few words, the software architecture of the system. In this paper, an approach for the architectural analysis of software systems, together with an environment implementing the approach, are described. The approach is based on a hierarchical architectural model that drives the application of a set of architectural recognizers. Each recognizer builds an abstract view describing some architectural aspects of the system, or of some of its parts