A Platform for the Automated Provisioning of Architecture Information for Large-Scale Service-Oriented Software Systems

Providing valid architecture information to stakeholders remains a challenge, as the effort required for documenting and maintaining this information over a longer period of time is very high. Automatically and continuously extracting architecture information from the system implementation makes it possible to document and keep architecture information up-to-date. In large software systems, architecture extraction has to deal with the continuous and efficient extraction of architectural information from very large code bases. In cooperation with a company from the financial sector, we have developed over several years a platform for the automatic extraction and provision of architectural information for large-scale service-oriented software systems. The platform was evaluated in a real industrial environment. The results of this evaluation show that it can provide up-to-date architectural information for large code bases on a daily basis. It also provides information on the trustworthiness of the extracted information and how it can be improved.