Recovering the architectural design for software comprehension

Abstract

The work described in this paper addresses the problem of understanding a software system and focuses in particular on the comprehension of the system architectural design. A method is proposed to reconstruct the architecture of a system and represent it in the form of a structure chart. The method assumes the system was originally designed with a functional decomposition approach, and aggregates program units into modules whenever these implement a functionality of the system. A directed graph that describes the activations of program units is used to model the system and the concept of node dominance on a directed graph is exploited to aggregate program units into modules and to derive intermodular relationships from the unit activations. Finally, the system data set is partitioned into sets of data items which are local to a given module and sets of data items which are global to the nodules belonging to a subtree of the structure chart, and the interfaces of modules are identified.<>