Software architecture recovery and re-documentation tool of a Hospital Information System

The fact that the maintenance cost occupies almost two-thirds of the total cost for a software system is reported repeatedly in research literatures. The high cost of software maintenance can be attributed to some common maintenance problems such as outdated software documents and obscured software architecture. This paper proposes a method undertaken by a medical center located in southern Taiwan to recover software architecture and rebuild documentation of its Hospital Information System. The architecture and documentation will serve as the foundation of migrating applications from legacy HIS systems to a component-based architecture. Our research starts with defining maintenance-oriented software architecture by studying system documents and interviewing experienced software analysts. The architectural information is then complemented by analyzing source code to address the incorrect system document issues. The recovered architectural information is stored into a repository in a top-down fashion. As we reconstruct the architecture, software developers need to provide additional descriptions to complete the documentation. A software architecture management system is developed to assist software developers in querying and maintaining software system documentation. The recovered architectural information could be used to evaluate change impacts, to extract activities of specific function such as database access and program linking, to discover relationship between user roles and functional items, and to estimate maintenance cost in the future.