Towards Open Source Software System Architecture Recovery Using Design Metrics

Over the past years, software development practices include open source code reuse. Since documentation gives little or no information about the system architecture, a prohibitive amount of effort is required to comprehend the source code and the overall system architecture. In this paper, we investigate how design metrics can reveal architectural information about a software system and more specifically, how architectural layers are correlated to design metrics. Finally, we present an empirical study on two large open source systems written in Java, attempting to identify metrics revealing information about the system architecture.