An Orchestrated Multi-view Software Architecture Reconstruction Environment

Most approaches in reverse engineering literature generate a single view of a software system that restricts the scope of the reconstruction process. We propose an orchestrated set of techniques and a multi-view toolkit to reconstruct three views of a software system such as design, behavior, and structure. Scenarios are central in generating design and behavior views. The design view is reconstructed by transforming a number of scenarios into design diagrams using a novel scenario schema and generating an objectbase of actors and actions and their dependencies. The behavior view is represented by different sets of functions that implement different features of the software system corresponding to a set of feature-specific scenarios that are derived from the design view. Finally, the structure view is reconstructed using modules and interconnections that are resulted by growing the core functions related to the software features that are extracted during the behavior recovery. This orchestrated view reconstruction technique provides a more accurate and comprehensive means for reverse engineering of a software system than a single view reconstruction approach. As case studies we applied the proposed multi-view approach on two systems, Xfig drawing tool and Pine email system