Reconstructing Architectural Views from Legacy Systems

Modernizing a large legacy system is a demanding and costly process which requires a deep understanding of the system´s architecture and its components. However legacy systems are poorly documented and they have often undergone many changes that make them deviate from their initial architectural design. Approaches for reconstructing architectural views from legacy systems and re-documenting the resulting components are of great value in the context of a modernization process. In this paper, we propose an approach that helps constructing distinct architectural views from legacy systems. To do so, we propose various clustering algorithms which are driven by common architectural views and styles. Our approach makes use of the knowledge discovery model which provides a standard machine-independent representation of legacy systems. We implemented and applied the approach in an industrial setting. The preliminary experimentations have shown that the algorithms perform well and produce comprehensive views.