Reconstructing a Functional Architecture for Existing Software

Abstract

This research aims to enable a wider audience to perform functional architecture modeling by exploring the suitability of alternative development artifacts for constructing a functional architecture model. These development artifacts need to contain feature-relevant information that can be used to model the functional behavior and observable interactions of a system.

The PIMS@all (PIMS) software product, developed by Centric, is analyzed as a business case. PIMS is an application used by HRM professional to assist in maintaining information about the client organization and its employees. The systems’ user documentation and user interface are used to extract feature-relevant information. A literature study is performed to gain insight in the structure and characteristics of these development artifacts. The Tree Constructor tool was developed during this research to perform analyses on the user documentation and user interface to extract information and to perform reverse engineering for the user interface. The strengths and limitations of the development artifacts and the extraction approaches that were used are discussed. The extracted information is used to reconstruct the functional architecture models for PIMS, which were not available beforehand. The resulting models are validated and evaluated afterwards.

We conclude that the PIMS user documentation is suitable for modeling the functional architecture, since most information could be extracted. More research is needed to determine if the hierarchal structure and topic groupings can produce similar results for other Help systems. Structural information of the PIMS user interface is extracted and analyzed to find functional information. In the case of PIMS there was not enough descriptive information to reliably determine the functionality, but results for Microsoft Word and Notepad proved to be more descriptive. More research is needed to find ways to reduce the effort of processing the implicit functional information from a UI to explicit functional information that is needed to model a functional architecture.