Architectural Extraction in Reverse Engineering by Prototyping: An Experiment

In this workshop proposal we present a prototype approach to help the extraction of architectural information in the re-engineering process. Commonly, the re-engineering life-cycle has been defined as a succession of the following tasks: analysis of requirements, model capture (understanding the system), problem detection, problem analysis, reorganization and change propagation [1]. We have evaluated the benefit of a prototyping approach with a focus on model capture. Although prototyping is a known approach to evaluate the application feasibility, costs, comparison and validation of choices, we focus in this paper on the aspects of prototyping that are helpful for re-engineering. In the following sections we first present the problem, and afterwards we present our proposal to solve this problem: a pattern describing how to use prototyping to extract architectural information from a legacy system.