Reverse engineering of distributed system architecture – a case study.

Abstract

To effectively reason about an existing software system it is often necessary to reverse engineering architectural information about the system from its implemented software artifacts. This process is particularly challenging for distributed systems since their architecture are specified in terms of runtime abstractions whose implementation is notoriously difficult to detect using existing reverse engineering technologies. This paper reports on a case study in which a new reverse engineering environment, called X-ray, was successfully applied to help extract architectural runtime abstractions from the source code of an existing client-server distributed system. The results of this and other similar case studies, involving distributed systems of varying size and application domains, indicate that X-ray can be a cost-effective alternative to other approaches proposed in the literature.