Recovering software layers from object oriented systems

Recovering the architecture of existing software systems remains a challenge and an active research field in software engineering. In this paper, we propose an approach to recover the layered architecture of object oriented software systems. To do so, our approach first recovers clusters corresponding to the various responsibilities of the system; the challenge in this context is to find the appropriate level of granularity of these responsibilities. Then the recovered clusters are assigned to layers using an optimization algorithm that exploits the principles of the layering architectural style. The approach was validated on five Java open source systems.