| Pattern matching approaches in reverse engineering aim to incorporate domain knowledge and system documentation in the software architecture extraction process, hence provide a user/tool collaborative environment for architectural design recovery. This thesis presents a model and an environment for recovering the high level design of legacy software systems based on user defined architectural patterns and graph matching techniques.;In the proposed model, a high-level view of a software system in terms of the system components and their interactions is represented as a query, using a description language. A query is mapped onto a pattern-graph, where a module and its interactions with other modules are represented as a group of graph-nodes and a group of graph-edges, respectively. Interaction constraints can be modeled by the description language as a part of the query. Such a pattern-graph is applied against an entity-relation graph that represents the information extracted from the source code of the software system. An approximate graph matching process performs a series of graph edit operations (i.e., node/edge insertion/deletion) on the pattern-graph and uses a ranking mechanism based on data mining association to obtain a sub-optimal solution. The obtained solution corresponds to an extracted architecture that complies with the given query.;An interactive prototype toolkit implemented as part of this thesis provides an environment for architecture recovery in two levels. First the system is decomposed into a number of subsystems of files. Second each subsystem can be decomposed into a number of modules of functions, datatypes, and variables. |
