Study of the Utility of Text Classification Based Software Architecture Recovery Method RELAX for Maintenance

TL;DR

The study demonstrates that the RELAX architecture recovery method significantly accelerates maintenance tasks for developers new to a project by providing clear architectural views, thereby improving efficiency and understanding.

Contribution

This research provides empirical evidence that RELAX's concern-based architectural views enhance maintenance productivity and user experience for software maintainers.

Findings

Participants reduced maintenance start time by over 5 times with RELAX.

All participants completed tasks successfully using RELAX views, unlike without them.

Participants found RELAX views easy to understand and helpful for learning system structure.

Abstract

Background. The software architecture recovery method RELAX produces a concern-based architectural view of a software system graphically and textually from that system's source code. The method has been implemented in software which can be run on subject systems whose source code is written in Java. Aims. Our aim was to find out whether the availability of architectural views produced by RELAX can help maintainers who are new to a project in becoming productive with development tasks sooner, and find out how they felt about working in such an environment. Method. We conducted a user study with nine participants. They were subjected to a controlled experiment in which maintenance success and speed with and without access to RELAX recovery results were compared to each other. Results. We have observed that employing architecture views produced by RELAX helped participants reduce time to get started on maintenance tasks by a factor of 5.38 or more. While most participants were unable to finish their tasks within the allotted time when they did not have recovery results available, all of them finished them successfully when they did. Additionally, participants reported that these views were easy to understand, helped them to learn the system's structure and enabled them to compare different versions of the system. Conclusions. In the speedup experienced to the start of maintenance experienced by the participants as well as in their experience-based opinions, RELAX has shown itself to be a valuable help that could form the basis for further tools that specifically support the development process with a focus on maintenance.