Understanding and recovering architecture rules ; Compreendendo e recuperando regras de Arquitetura

Software architecture is fundamental to clearly present the most important structures, roles, and rules of a software, which collectively are used to guide software design and implementation. Thus, the existence of reliable architecture documentation is critical to develop and maintain software in a controlled way. Despite the importance of architecture documentation, there are systems without proper documentation, as their documentation is often outdated or nonexistent. To help overcome this problem, many studies investigate how to maintain conformity between architecture documentation and the source code. However, most of these studies provide a low precision demanding an expert postverification, which is an error-prone and time-consuming task, to provide useful architecture documentation. To support architecture documentation, we propose the Weightedgraph- based (WGB) method to recover architecture rules. Our method is based on the idea that high-level architecture rules can be derived through the investigation of source code dependencies, thus decreasing the effort of providing useful architecture rules with a reduced need for human verification. To achieve our goals, we investigate the source code dependencies and the architecture differences between them. Based on this investigation, we propose the WGB method that relies on the module dependency strength metric and linear equation solver to provide relevant architecture rules. It is domain-independent because it needs only the source code as information to execute. We evaluate our proposed method with a case study presenting details of how it works, an offline study presenting the application of our method in six subject systems, and a user study analyzing the rules extracted using our method in two commercial systems from the perspective of the developers. The results show that our method extracts useful and appropriate architecture rules using only the source code as information, thus supporting the task of recovering the architecture rules. Furthermore, ...