Architectural views through collapsing strategies

Architectural views help to better understand and analyze software from particular stakeholder perspectives. Views are abstractions that are generated in an architecture reconstruction effort with collapsing strategies. Collapsing is the mechanism to aggregate detailed source information into architectural elements that constitute the architectural views. The elements are presented in a particular viewtype and style. Traditional software architecture reconstruction tools assume that source elements are collapsed into mostly one container. However, the Satellite Tracking System case study, outlined in this paper, required the introduction of multi-collapses. Multi-collapses allow the aggregation of one element into multiple containers. Multi-collapses are either the result of applying incorrect collapsing strategies or an excellent starting point for software analysis to gain better understanding of existing software. We describe implementation and visualization aspects of multi-collapses within an architecture reconstruction environment.