On bridging the gap between practice and vision for software architecture reconstruction and evolution: a toolbox perspective

Up-to-date architecture views help to better understand and meaningfully evolve software systems. Despite their importance, the views are typically either not defined or not monitored and updated when changes to the actual systems are performed. They thus become subject of continuous degradation. To reconstruct the views, architecture monitoring and reconstruction tools have been developed and proposed. However, according to our analysis of the state of the art and state of the practice, we have identified that existing tools still lack some important ingredients needed to meaningfully monitor and reconstruct the architecture description of software systems. This paper gives an insight of these improvement potentials and proposes a vision for the development of a stronger industry-oriented software architecture monitoring, reconstruction and evolution tool.