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Hierarchical Code-to-Architecture Mapping

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Software Architecture (ECSA 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13365))

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Abstract

Automating the mapping of a system’s code to its architecture is important in improving the adoption of successful Software Architecture Consistency Checking (SACC) methods like Reflexion Modelling. InMap is an interactive and iterative code-to-architecture mapping recommendation approach that achieves a rather decent recall and precision of 0.97 and 0.82 respectively, using minimal architecture documentation to apply natural language techniques to a software’s codebase. Nevertheless, InMap like most other automated recommendations techniques maps to architectural modules, low-level source code units like classes. For large complex systems, this can still hinder adoption due to the review effort required by a software architect when accepting or rejecting the recommendations. In this paper, we present a hierarchical package mapping technique that provides recommendations for higher-level source code units, i.e. packages. It utilizes InMap’s information retrieval capabilities to recommend mappings between the software’s packages and its architectural modules. We show that using our proposed technique we are able to reduce the recommendation review effort required by an architect, by 95% on average, for the six systems tested, and still achieve a code coverage of 75%.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden

    Zipani Tom Sinkala & Sebastian Herold

Authors
  1. Zipani Tom Sinkala
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  2. Sebastian Herold
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zipani Tom Sinkala .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Università di Bergamo, Dalmine, Italy

    Patrizia Scandurra

  2. University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Matthias Galster

  3. Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Raffaela Mirandola

  4. KU Leuven, Kortrijk, Belgium

    Danny Weyns

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Sinkala, Z.T., Herold, S. (2022). Hierarchical Code-to-Architecture Mapping. In: Scandurra, P., Galster, M., Mirandola, R., Weyns, D. (eds) Software Architecture. ECSA 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13365. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15116-3_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15116-3_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-15115-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-15116-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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