Software ENgineering Symphony: View-Driven Software Architecture Reconstruction

Authentic descriptions of a software architecture are required as a reliable foundation for any but trivial changes to a system. Far too often, architecture descriptions of existing systems are out of sync with the implementation. If they are, they must be reconstructed. There are many existing techniques for reconstructing individual architecture views, but no information about how to select views for reconstruction, or about process aspects of architecture reconstruction in general. In this paper we describe view-driven process for reconstructing software architecture that fills this gap. To describe Symphony, we present and compare different case studies, thus serving a secondary goal of sharing real-life reconstruction experience. The Symphony process incorporates the state of the practice, where reconstruction is problemdriven and uses a rich set of architecture views. Symphony provides a common framework for reporting reconstruction experiences and for comparing reconstruction approaches. Finally, it is a vehicle for exposing and demarcating research problems in software architecture reconstruction. 1998 ACM Computing Classification System: D.2.9, D.2.2, D.2.5, D.2.7