2024/07/25 by Filipe Figueiredo Correia, Correia, Filipe F., Ricardo Maia Ferreira +9
Computer Science · #Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #Software Engineering Techniques and Practices #Software System Performance and Reliability
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2407.17990
openalex publication_date 2024/07/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Software architecture often consists of interconnected components dispersed across source code and other development artifacts, making visualization difficult without costly additional documentation. Although some tools can automatically generate architectural diagrams, these hardly fully reflect the architecture of the system. We propose the value of automatic architecture recovery from multiple software artifacts, combined with the ability to manually adjust recovered models and automate the recovery process. We present a general approach to achieve this and describe a tool that generates architectural diagrams for a software system by analyzing its software artifacts and unifying them into a comprehensive system representation. This representation can be manually modified while ensuring that changes are reintegrated into the diagram when it is regenerated. We argue that adopting a similar approach in other types of documentation tools is possible and can render similar benefits.