A Process-Oriented Software Architecture Reconstruction Taxonomy

International audienceTo maintain and understand large applications, it is cru- cial to know their architecture. The first problem is that architectures are not explicitly represented in the code as classes and packages are. The second problem is that suc- cessful applications evolve over time so their architecture inevitably drifts. Reconstructing and checking whether the architecture is still valid is thus an important aid. While there is a plethora of approaches and techniques supporting architecture reconstruction, there is no comprehensive state of the art and it is often difficult to compare the ap- proaches. This article presents a first state of the art in soft- ware architecture reconstruction, with the desire to support the understanding of the field