On reverse engineering of structural and behavioral views for architecture compliance checking

If no or only incomplete high-level software models exist, the reverse engineering of views is important in order to fully understand existing software systems. In this thesis we focus on the extraction of architectural behavioural views from information gathered during the run-time of the system under study. We use a structural view to display static and dynamic information at the same time and introduce a filtering mechanism that can be used to visually compare the behaviour of different scenarios. In addition, we use a sequence diagram visualization to display the behaviour of one scenario on architectural component level. By synchronizing structural and dynamic views we enable the software engineer to easily switch between both views. We introduce a novel heuristic approach to check the compliance between the implemented and planned behaviour of a system. The result of the compliance check is visualized in the sequence diagram view. We successfully demonstrated the approach's scalability for commercial software products in two industry case studies and successfully applied our compliance checking approach in the dynamic analysis of a software testbed.