Quality-Driven Extraction of a Component-based Architecture from an Object-Oriented System

Software architecture modeling and representation became a main phase of the development process of complex systems. In fact, software architecture representation provides many advantages during all phases of software life cycle. Nevertheless, for many systems, like legacy or eroded ones, there is no available representation of their architectures. In order to benefit from this representation, we propose, in this paper, an approach called ROMANTIC which focuses on extracting the architecture of an object-oriented system. The main idea of this approach is to propose a quasi-automatic process of architecture recovery based on the quality characteristics of an architecture by formulating it as a search-based problem. This last acts on the space composed of all possible architectures abstracting the object-oriented system.