Reconstruction of execution architecture view using dependency relationships and execution traces

Abstract

Software(1) architecture represents the structure of a software system. The execution architecture view is an especially important architecture view as it can be essential in designing and analyzing the execution structure of a system. Therefore, researchers have proposed various methods of reconstructing an execution architecture view for the systems but most of them rely on the existing architectural knowledge of the target system such as hypothesized views, existing documentations, or experts of the target system. However, when there are no available documentations or experts, such methods cannot be used for reconstructing the execution architecture view. In this paper, we propose a method that reconstructs an execution architecture view in the absence of architectural knowledge of the target system. In order to systematically bridge source code and execution elements, our method utilizes the implementation mechanisms that are identified from the dependency relationships between source code and the APIs of standard and external libraries. Once implementation mechanisms are defined, finally we can construct the execution view of the target system by extracting execution components and connectors from the execution traces obtained through the implementation mechanisms. To show the efficacy of the proposed method, a case study is conducted.