Developing an approach for the recovery of distributed software architectures

The extraction of high-level architectural information from existing software systems, or architecture recovery, is a recent research area. This paper presents X-RAY, an approach for recovering distributed software architectures. X-RAY builds on previous work on architecture recovery and more traditional reverse engineering techniques, as well as on notations for architecture description. The key features of the approach are illustrated through the depiction of a step-by-step recovery experiment performed on a small yet non-trivial distributed software system. Initial results from an ongoing experiment involving a larger-scale system are also discussed.