Systematically reviewing the layered architectural pattern principles and their use to reconstruct software architectures
This work addresses the challenge of reconstructing layered architectures in legacy software systems, which is incremental as it builds on prior component identification methods.
The authors tackled the problem of loosely defined criteria for identifying layers in layered software architectures by conducting a systematic literature review to inventory and group criteria into four principles, identifying six design rules, and synthesizing literature on architecture reconstruction using these criteria.
Architectural reconstruction is a reverse engineering activity aiming at recovering the missing decisions on a system. It can help identify the components, within a legacy software application, according to the application's architectural pattern. It is useful to identify architectural technical debt. We are interested in identifying layers within a layered application since the layered pattern is one of the most used patterns to structure large systems. Earlier component reconstruction work focusing on that pattern relied on generic component identification criteria, such as cohesion and coupling. Recent work has identified architectural-pattern specific criteria to identify components within that pattern. However, the architectural-pattern specific criteria that the layered pattern embodies are loosely defined. In this paper, we present a first systematic literature review (SLR) of the literature aiming at inventorying such criteria for layers within legacy applications and grouping them under four principles that embody the fundamental design principles under-lying the architectural pattern. We identify six such criteria in the form of design rules. We also perform a second systematic literature review to synthesize the literature on software architecture reconstruction in the light of these criteria. We report those principles, the rules they encompass, their representation, and their usage in software architecture reconstruction.