Architectural Layer Recovery for Software System Understanding and Evolution

This paper presents an approach to identify software layers for the understanding and evolution of software systems implemented with any object-oriented programming language. The approach first identifies relations between the classes of a software system and then uses a link analysis algorithm (i.e. the Kleinberg algorithm) to group them into layers. Additionally to assess the approach and the underlying techniques, the paper also presents a prototype of a supporting tool and the results from a case study