Recovering Three-Level Architectures from the Code of Open-Source Java Spring Projects

International audienceDespite the well-admitted benefits of keeping design decisions as a documentation all along the lifecycle of software, many software projects have lost this information. In order to use design information to guide software maintenance and evolution, this paper proposes to retro-engineer architecture descriptions from source code. The originality of this work is to target a three-leveled architecture description language which represents software specification , configuration and deployment. Retro-engineering these three levels will provide a more precise source of guidance for the maintenance of software. Targeted projects are open-source Java projects that use Spring to describe the implemented "architecture"