The Value of Software Architecture Recovery for Maintenance

In order to maintain a system, it is beneficial to know its software architecture. In the common case that this architecture is unavailable, architecture recovery provides a way to recover an architectural view of the system. Many different methods and tools exist to provide such a view. While there have been taxonomies of different recovery methods and surveys of their results along with measurements of how these results conform to expert's opinions on the systems, there has not been a survey that goes beyond a simple automatic comparison. Instead, this paper seeks to answer questions about the viability of individual methods in given situations, the quality of their results and whether these results can be used to indicate and measure the quality and quantity of architectural changes. For our case study, we look at the results of recoveries of versions of Android, Apache Hadoop and Apache Chukwa obtained by running PKG, ACDC and ARC.