We describe the experiences we have had in using ManSART - a software architecture recovery tool that we developed and are employing in the analysis of large scale legacy software systems. ManSART uses a battery of standard data flow, control flow, and program slicing capabilities to automatically recover architectural features from source code. This source code analysis is enabled by representations called analysis. Analysis modules describe the interfaces of each component in a multiple component system. ManSART uses these modules to focus source code analysis and to store the results.

Automatically recovered (reverse engineered) architectural views of legacy software are valuable for carrying out many software engineering tasks.However, while directly recovered views provide some relevant information, they often are either too fragmented or complex to be really useful in practice.This paper describes methods for making views more useful.We automatically combine and/or simplify views to produce hierarchies, hybrids, and abstractions.The methods we use take advantage of the source code fragments underlying the views to cross-reference between parts from different views.