Understanding the architecture of a program requires determining both the major components into which the system is broken and the ways in which the components interact to accomplish the program’s goals. Both static and dynamic analyses of the software can aid in obtaining this understanding. This paper describes an analysis technique for gaining such understanding and a visualization tool, called ISVis, that supports it. The technique is applied to the problem of enhancing the Mosaic web browser by both visualizing its architecture and finding the components of the browser into which an enhancement should be inserted.

Evolving an existing software system is fundamentally different from developing one from scratch. Consequently, tools to support evolution must go beyond traditional development tools. This paper describes the Esprit de Corps Suite (EDCS) of software evolution tools. EDCS supports the Mission Oriented Architectural Legacy Evolution (MORALE) software reengineering process. The paper briefly describes MORALE before presenting the individual tools and how they interoperate to support legacy system evolution.

: Architectural recovery and evolution of legacy systems is a promising research field for the upcoming years. Most of current research works use a bottom-up approach by developing analysis and abstraction techniques of low level knowledge. Few recent works use a combined approach (top-down and bottom up) based on the modeling and the exploitation of domain models. This work proposes a combined approach based on the modeling and the exploitation of "real world" knowledge, thus avoiding the arduous and costly domain models building. The approach is supported by an information systems meta model that represents the major manipulated concepts. The meta model, the approach and its contributions are discussed. Key words : Architectural recovery and evolution, reverse engineering, meta model I. Introduction Nowadays many legacy systems suffer from maintenance costs and inadequacy to the users' needs. These systems have been maintained for many years by different maintainers and are bein...