Definition of Reference Architectures based on Existing Systems WP 5.2, Lifecycle and Process for Family Integration

ions, aggregations and groupings of the code architecture view elements build the higher-level view (i.e., first the module view, then the conceptual view). The higher level or abstracted entities and relations can be mapped to concrete ones at the code level. During architecture recovery activities, code architecture view and the execution architecture views produce a lot of facts about the software system. The facts are then the foundation for the two other views. In case of an ambiguity in the higher views, the reverse architect can step at every time into the details, and inspect his assumptions. For a large-scale software system, code views will contain a lot of elements (even for medium-scale systems up to several millions elements), which can be hardly managed by humans. For this reason, the foundation has to be shifted to a manageable level (i.e., mapped to elements of higher abstraction, for instance elements of the module and the conceptual architecture views). Having all these views, an analysis of the software system can be performed in a topdown (guidance from the higher levels) and a bottom-up (from details to abstractions) manner or both combined.