A comparative analysis of software architecture recovery techniques

Many automated techniques of varying accuracy have been developed to help recover the architecture of a software system from its implementation. However, rigorously assessing these techniques has been hampered by the lack of architectural “ground truths”. Over the past several years, we have collected a set of eight architectures that have been recovered from open-source systems and independently, carefully verified. In this paper, we use these architectures as ground truths in performing a comparative analysis of six state-of-the-art software architecture recovery techniques. We use a number of metrics to assess each technique for its ability to identify a system's architectural components and overall architectural structure. Our results suggest that two of the techniques routinely outperform the rest, but even the best of the lot has surprisingly low accuracy. Based on the empirical data, we identify several avenues of future research in software architecture recovery.