A slicing-based approach to extracting reusable software architectures

Abstract

An alternative approach to developing reusable components from scratch is to recover them from existing systems. Although numerous techniques have been proposed to recover reusable components from existing systems, most have focused on implementation code, rather than software architecture. We apply architectural slicing to extract reusable architectural elements (i.e., components and connectors) from the existing architectural specification of a software system. Unlike traditional program slicing, which operates on the source code of a program to provide the low-level implementation details of the program, architectural slicing directly operates on the architectural specification of a software system, and therefore can provide useful knowledge about the high-level architecture of the system.