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1997
Conference Paper
Titel
Finding Components in a Hierarchy of Modules: a Step towards Architectural Understanding
Abstract
This paper presents a method to view a system as a hierarchy of modules according to information hiding con cepts and to identify architectural component candidates in this hierarchy. The result of the method eases the under standing of a system's underlying software architecture. A prototype tool implementing this method was applied to three systems written in C (each over 30 Kloc). For one of these systems, an author of the system created an architec tural description. The components generated by our method correspond to those of this architectural descrip tion in almost all cases. For the other two systems, most of the components resulting from the method correspond to meaningful system abstractions.