Towards an integrated view on architecture and its evolution

Information about the evolution of a software architecture can be found in the source basis of a project and in the release history data such as modification reports. Existing approaches deal with these two data sources separately and do not exploit the integration of their analyses. In this paper, we present an architecture analysis approach that utilizes both evolution data sources and provides an integration of different views. The analysis applies fact extraction and generates specific directed attributed graphs; nodes represent source code entities and edges represent relationships such as accesses, includes, inherits, invokes, and coupling between certain architectural elements. The integration of data is then performed on a meta-model level to enable the generation of architectural views using binary relational algebra. These integrated architectural views show intended and unintended couplings between architectural elements, hence pointing software architects to locations in the system that may be critical for on-going and future maintenance activities. We demonstrate our analyis approach using a large open source software system. Key words: software evolution analysis, software architecture, architectural view