Towards Living Software Architecture Diagrams

• Main Authors: Correia, Filipe F, Ferreira, Ricardo, Queiroz, Paulo G. G, Nunes, Henrique, Barra, Matilde, Figueiredo, Duarte
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 25-07-2024
• Subjects: Computer Science - Software Engineering
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2407.17990

Software architecture often consists of interconnected components dispersed
across source code and other development artifacts, making visualization
difficult without costly additional documentation. Although some tools can
automatically generate architectural diagrams, these hardly fully reflect the
architecture of the system. We propose the value of automatic architecture
recovery from multiple software artifacts, combined with the ability to
manually adjust recovered models and automate the recovery process. We present
a general approach to achieve this and describe a tool that generates
architectural diagrams for a software system by analyzing its software
artifacts and unifying them into a comprehensive system representation. This
representation can be manually modified while ensuring that changes are
reintegrated into the diagram when it is regenerated. We argue that adopting a
similar approach in other types of documentation tools is possible and can
render similar benefits.