Evolutionary and collaborative software architecture recovery with Softwarenaut

Architecture recovery is an activity applied to a system whose initial architecture has eroded. When the system is large, the user must use dedicated tools to support the recovery process. We present Softwarenaut a tool which supports architecture recovery through interactive exploration and visualization. Classical architecture recovery features, such as filtering and details on demand, are enhanced with evolutionary capabilities when multi-version information about a subject system is available. The tool allows sharing and discovering the results of previous analysis sessions through a global repository of architectural views indexed by systems. We present the features of the tool together with the architecture recovery process that it supports using as a case-study ArgoUML, a well-known open source Java system. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.