How to generate System Architecture from java code?

Question

By System Architecture I mean the computational components of the software system and interactions/relationship among those components. The components may be tasks, processes, objects or modules etc. Different components are connected by connectors(procedure call, implicit invocation, message passing, instantiation, shared database etc).

I have generated UML diagrams via reverse engineering using Visual Paradigm, but can I also generate Architecture?

Answer 1

Since components and interactions can be not explicit in code in general case you can not generate such diagram automatically. You should study different aspects of your application: source code, existing documentation, user interface, configuration, jira tasks, etc and try to restore the original architecture.

Answer 2

An "architecture" is just a view of some code properties, that don't change very fast. (If a property changes fast, it isn't the basis of an architecture).

From this perspective, UML diagrams are a kind of architecture. So is a call graph, and so is any modularization scheme you might have chosen.

The lesson is that "extracting architecture" first requires you decide what properties of the code you want to see abstractly, and then building (if you can) machinery to extract that information.

Since people mostly don't agree on what properties are useful, you gets lots of arguments about "what's an (my favorite) architecture", and you don't get a lot of tools since they are hard to build and there are lots of them.