The concept of software architecture has gained a lot of attention and has found its way into the software development process in industry. Software architecture recovery focuses on the recovery of architectural information from existing systems. This paper presents a framework for recovering the software architecture of a program family. Based on the available system information architectural properties such as safety or system control are recovered using different reverse engineering methods and tools in combination with architectural descriptions. We describe our architecture recovery process and discuss the recovery of system structure as one example of the case study. The framework was developed while working on the recovery of the family architecture of a train control system.

Reverse engineering tools support software engineers in the process of analysing and understanding complex software systems during maintenance, re-engineering or re-architecturing. The functionality of such tools varies from editing and browsing capabilities to the generation of textual and graphical reports. There are several commercial reverse engineering tools on the market providing different capabilities and supporting specific source code languages. We evaluated four reverse engineering tools that analyse C source code: Refine/C, Imagix 4D, SNiFF+ and Rigi. We investigated the capabilities of these tools by applying them to a real-world embedded software system as a case study. We identified benefits and shortcomings of these tools and assessed their applicability for embedded software systems, their usability and their extensibility. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.