Creating systems from scratch is time consuming and costly, therefore companies often choose to evolve existing systems. The understanding that a company has about the impact that a change has in the system architecture determines their ability to cope with system evolution. System architects and designers need to have an architecture representation that enables them to understand and to foresee consequences of evolving the system. This representation however is often not documented. Reverse architecting enables to recover the architecture representation. In this paper, experiences in reverse architecting in a industrial case at Philips Healthcare MRI Group is presented. We show that the proposed approach provides an effective framework to reason about evolvability and impact that design changes has on the system.
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