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Abstract
When a software system is developed by a large team of programmers, and has matured’ for several years, changes to the code may introduce unexpected interactions between diverse parts of the system. This occurs because the system has become too large for one person to fully understand, and the original design documentation has become obsolete as the system has evolved. Symptoms of structural problems include too many unnecessary recompilations, unintended cyclic dependency chains, and some types of difficulties with understanding, modifying, and testing the system. Most structural problems cannot be solved by making a few “small” changes, and most require the programmer to understand the overall pattern of interactions in order to solve the problem. The ARCH project at Siemens Research is building an “architect’s assistant” for a software maintenance environment. &tCH will help the software architect analyze the structure of an existing system, specify an architecture for it, and determine whether the actual software is consistent with the specification. Since the system’s structural architecture may never have been formally specified, we want ARCH to be able to “discover” the architecture by automatically analyzing the existing code. It should also be able to critique an architecture by comparing it to the existing code and suggesting changes that would produce a more modular specification.

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