Exploring the Relationships between Software Architecture and Source Code

Software Architecture (SA) is introduced as highlevel structures and the blueprint of a software system. Over the last decades, SA was broadly researched in academia and adopted in industry. SA design and code implementation are two essential and integral parts of the software development lifecycle. In recent years, there has been a research trend on investigating the relationships between SA and source code. Exploring such relationships is conducive to software system maintenance and evolution. The recent researches on the relationships between SA and code are mainly focused on the following questions: How to recover SA from code? How to automatically generate code from SA? How to detect architectural problems from code? But little research has been conducted on systematically analyzing, synthesizing, and using the relationships between SA and code. This PhD research* proposes systematic methods with the purpose of summarizing, classifying, analyzing, identifying, and using the relationships between SA and code to effectively maintain and evolve software systems.