Extracting and Facilitating Architecture in Service-Oriented Software Systems

In enterprises using service-oriented architecture (SOA) architectural information is used for various activities including analysis, design, governance, and quality assurance. Architectural information is created, stored and maintained in various locations like enterprise architecture management tools, design tools, text documents, and service registries/repositories. Capturing and maintaining this information manually is time-intensive, expensive and error-prone. To address this problem we present an approach for automatically extracting architectural information from an actual SOA implementation. The extracted information represents the currently implemented architecture and can be used as the basis for quality assurance tasks and, through synchronization, for keeping architectural information consistent in various other tools and locations. The presented approach has been developed for a SOA in the banking domain. Aside from presenting the main drivers for the approach and the approach itself, we report on experiences in applying the approach to different applications in this domain.