Architecture Recovery for Distributed Systems

The ability to recover up-to-date architectural information from existing software artifacts is key to effective software maintenance, reengineering and reuse. Although architecture recovery can be facilitated with the help of current reverse engineering techniques and tools, many issues remain to be properly addressed, particularly regarding recovery of runtime abstractions (e.g., clients, server, interaction protocols) that are typical to distributed system design. In this position paper we claim that integrating multiple static analysis techniques can be a cost-effective way of recovering a distributed system's “as-built” architectural design. To support this claim, we present X-ray, an integrated, static analysis based architecture recovery approach for distributed systems.