  A variety of sources have noted that a substantial proportion of non trivial
software systems fail due to unhindered architectural erosion. This design
deterioration leads to low maintainability, poor testability and reduced
development speed. The erosion of software systems is often caused by
inadequate understanding, documentation and maintenance of the desired
implementation architecture. If the desired architecture is lost or the
deterioration is advanced, the reconstruction of the desired architecture and
the realignment of this desired architecture with the physical architecture
both require substantial manual analysis and implementation effort. This paper
describes the initial development of a framework for automatic software
architecture reconstruction and source code migration. This framework offers
the potential to reconstruct the conceptual architecture of software systems
and to automatically migrate the physical architecture of a software system
toward a conceptual architecture model. The approach is implemented within a
proof of concept prototype which is able to analyze java system and reconstruct
a conceptual architecture for these systems as well as to refactor the system
towards a conceptual architecture.

Software Engineering