Extracting Reusable Software Architectures: A Slicing-Based Approach

An alternative approach to developing reusable components from scratch is to recover them from existing systems. Although numerous techniques have been proposed to recover reusable components from existing systems, most have focused on implementation code, rather than software architecture. In this paper, we apply architectural slicing to extract reusable architectures from existing architectural specifications. Architectural slicing is designed to operate on the architectural specification of a software system to provide knowledge about the high-level structure of a software system, rather than the traditional program slicing which is designed to operate on the source code of a program to provide the low-level implementation details of a program. 1 Introduction Software architecture is receiving increasingly attention as a critical design level for software systems [17]. The software architecture of a system defines its highlevel structure, exposing its gross organization as a colle..