Towards reconstructing architectural models of software tools by runtime analysis

We present a method and initial results on reverse engineering the architecture of monolithic software systems. Our approach is based on analysis of system binaries resulting in a series of models, which are successively refined into a component structure. Our approach comprises the following steps: 1) instrumentation of existing binaries for dynamically generating execution traces at runtime and connected analysis, 2) static inspection of binaries, 3) interpretation using domain knowledge, and 4) identifying component boundaries using software clustering. We motivate a generic method which covers a large class of software systems, and evaluate our method on concrete software tools for industrial automation systems development, focusing on Intel x86 and Microsoft Windows-compatible applications.