Component-Based Architecture Recovery from Object Oriented Systems via Relational Concept Analysis

Software architecture modelling and representation has become an important phase of the development process of complex software systems. Using software architecture representation as a high level view provides many advantages during all phases of the software life cycle. Nevertheless, for many systems, such architecture representation is not available. To deal with this problem, we propose in this paper an approach of architecture recovery which aims to extract component-based architecture from an object-oriented (OO) system, by a semiautomatic exploration process. To this end, we use relational concept analysis in order to identify the architectural components. The RCA-based approach comes as a complementary method to relieve some limits of the existing implementation of ROMANTIC based on simulated annealing algorithm. In the RCA approach, architectural components are identified from concepts derived by exploiting all existing dependency relations between classes of the OO system. We evaluated the feasibility of our approach on a Java software.