Sylvain Chardigny

Extraction of Component-Based Architecture from Object-Oriented Systems

Software architecture modeling and representation became a main phase of the development process of complex systems. In fact, software architecture representation provides many advantages during all phases of software life cycle. Nevertheless, for many systems, like legacy or eroded ones, there is no available representation of their architectures. In order to benefit from this representation, we propose, in this paper, an approach called ROMANTIC which focuses on extracting a component-based architecture of an existing object-oriented system. The main idea of this approach is to propose a quasi-automatic process of architecture recovery based on semantic and structural characteristics of software architecture concepts.

Quality-Centric Approach for Software Component Identification from Object-Oriented Code

Components and connectors are the main building blocks for software architectures. In the design phase of a software system, components can either be created from scratch or reused. When reused, they can either exist on component shelves or identified from existing software systems. Thus, software component identification is one of the primary challenges in component based software engineering. Typically, the identification is done by analyzing existing software artifacts. When considering object-oriented systems, many approaches have been proposed to deal with this issue by identifying a component as a high cohesive and loose coupled set of classes. However, this assumption leads to two main limitations: in one hand, the focus on simple metrics like high cohesion and loose coupling will not necessarily lead to the identification of good quality components. On the other hand, the identified components external structure (provided and required interfaces) is missing. As a result, the identified components can hardly be reused, composed, packaged and documented. To overcome these limitations, we propose in this paper an approach for identifying components based on a fitness function to measure the quality of a component. To evaluate this function, we use a semantic-correctness model defined in our previous works. Also, we propose to identify provided and required interfaces of components.

Quality-Driven Extraction of a Component-based Architecture from an Object-Oriented System

Software architecture modeling and representation became a main phase of the development process of complex systems. In fact, software architecture representation provides many advantages during all phases of software life cycle. Nevertheless, for many systems, like legacy or eroded ones, there is no available representation of their architectures. In order to benefit from this representation, we propose, in this paper, an approach called ROMANTIC which focuses on extracting the architecture of an object-oriented system. The main idea of this approach is to propose a quasi-automatic process of architecture recovery based on the quality characteristics of an architecture by formulating it as a search-based problem. This last acts on the space composed of all possible architectures abstracting the object-oriented system.

Search-Based Extraction of Component-Based Architecture from Object-Oriented Systems

Software architecture modeling and representation are a main phase of the development process of complex systems. In fact, software architecture representation provides many advantages during all phases of software life cycle. Nevertheless, for many systems, like legacy or eroded ones, there is no available representation of their architectures. In order to benefit from this representation, we propose an approach called ROMANTIC which focuses on extracting a component-based architecture of an existing object-oriented system. This approach considers this problem as a balancing problem of competing constraints which aims to select the best solution among all the possible architectures. Consequently, we present in this paper the identified constraints of this problem and its formulation as a search-based problem.

Software architecture recovery process based on object-oriented source code and documentation

Architecture recovery aims at providing a high level abstraction of a system using the architectural elements to represent functionalities and interactions. This architecture makes easier the program comprehension and then provides many advantages during all the phases of software life cycle. Nevertheless, most architecture recovery approaches fail to combine the human expertise on the system with a high automation level. In order to solve this issue, we propose to use the intentional architecture of a system, which represent the system as imagined by its designers, to improve the adequation between the resulting software architecture and the architects expectations without requiring more human expertise. Thus, we present in this paper a semi-automatic process to recover intentional architecture from the available documentation and the expert recommendations. This process is an extension of ROMANTIC, an approach aiming at recovering a component-based architecture of an existing object-oriented system.

Comparing and combining genetic and clustering algorithms for software component identification from object-oriented code

Software component identification is one of the primary challenges in component based software engineering. Typically, the identification is done by analyzing existing software artifacts. When considering object-oriented systems, many approaches have been proposed to deal with this issue by identifying a component as a strongly related set of classes. We propose in this paper a comparison between the formulations and the results of two algorithms for the identification of software components: clustering and genetic. Our goal is to show that each of them has advantages and disadvantages. Thus, the solution we adopted is to combine them to enhance the results.

Extraction d'une architecture à base de composants depuis un système orienté objet : Une approche dirigée par les propriétés de qualité

Software architecture modeling and representation are a main phase of the development process of complex systems. In fact, software architecture representation provides many advantages during all phases of software life cycle. Nevertheless, for many systems, like legacy or eroded ones, there is no available representation of their architectures. In order to benefit from this representation, we propose, in this paper, an approach called ROMANTIC which focuses on extracting a component-based architecture of an existing object-oriented system. The main idea of this approach is to propose a quasi-automatic process of architecture recovery based on the quality characteristics of an architecture by formulating it as a search-based problem. This last acts on the space composed ofall possible architectures abstracting the object-oriented system.