DiscoTect: a system for discovering architectures from running systems

One of the challenging problems for software developers is guaranteeing that a system as built is consistent with its architectural design. In this paper, we describe a technique that uses run time observations about an executing system to construct an architectural view of the system. With this technique, we develop mappings that exploit regularities in system implementation and architectural style. These mappings describe how low-level system events can be interpreted as more abstract architectural operations. We describe the current implementation of a tool that uses these mappings, and show that it can highlight inconsistencies between implementation and architecture.