Towards a reference process for software architecture reconstruction

Nowadays, software systems remain useful and competitive; entail the inevitable need to change over time and to be adapted to new technologies, platforms, and architectures. These quick changes imply following systematic, automated, or standardised processes that provide recommendations and guidelines to architects during software architecture reconstruction. Considerable research work on architecture reconstruction has been conducted. However, it needs to be studied thoroughly to determine what are the common activities and elements to reconstruct software architectures, and to define a reference process for systematically guiding the evolution of software architectures. This work addresses the need for defining a process for software architecture reconstruction called software improvement in the reconstruction of architectures (SIRA). This process has been rigorously designed from the results of a systematic literature review and a small survey of related work. As a result, SIRA integrates and extends previous research and can be conceived as a reference process to reconstruct software architectures in a semi-automated way. In addition, this work also determines the common elements of the architecture reconstruction process: (i) techniques and activities; (ii) architectural elements, patterns, and attributes; (iii) mechanisms and strategies; and (iv) the automation and recommendation tasks of the process.