Evaluating architectural extractors

Abstract

One of the goals of reverse engineering a software system is to extract an architectural design from the source code. This paper compares a selection of tools available to perform this architectural recovery. The following tools are examined: Rigi (Muller, 1996), the Dali workbench (Kazman and Carriere, 1998), the Software Bookshelf (PBS) (Finnigan et al., 1997), CIA (Chen et al., 1990) and SNiFF+. This comparison is based on the abilities of the tools to perform data extraction, classification, and visualization. Of the tools evaluated, the Software Bookshelf and the Dali workbench were found to be the most suitable for architectural recovery.