Towards Living Software Architecture Diagrams

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method and tool for automatically recovering, visualizing, and manually adjusting software architecture diagrams from multiple artifacts, improving understanding and documentation of complex systems.

Contribution

It presents a general approach and a tool for automatic architecture recovery that allows manual adjustments and reintegration, enhancing existing visualization techniques.

Findings

The tool effectively generates comprehensive architectural diagrams from software artifacts.

Manual adjustments can be seamlessly reintegrated into the automated recovery process.

The approach can be extended to other documentation tools for better system understanding.

Abstract

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.