On the Automatic Recovery of Style-Specific Architectural Relations in Software Systems

摘要

The cost of maintaining a software system over a long period of time far exceeds its initial development cost. Much of the maintenance cost is attributed to the time required by new developers to understand legacy systems. High-level structural information helps maintainers navigate through the numerous low-level components and relations present in the source code. Modularization tools can be used to produce subsystem decompositions from the source code but do not typically produce high-level architectural relations between the newly found subsystems. Controlling subsystem interactions is one important way in which the overall complexity of software maintenance can be reduced.