The Orphan Adoption problem in architecture maintenance

A lot of research time has been devoted to finding a solution to the problem of automatic clustering, especially in the field of reverse engineering, where decomposing a legacy system to subsystems could be the key to understanding it. Maintaining the obtained structure as a system evolves, however, is a problem that has attracted much less attention. We present the Orphan Adoption problem in architecture maintenance, and propose an algorithm to solve it. We also present case studies that validate the usefulness of our algorithm.