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Authors: Alexander Egyed and Philippe Kruchten

Rational Rose is a graphical software modeling tool, using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as its primary notation. It offers an open API that allows the development of additional functionality ("add-ins"). In this paper, we describe Rose/Architect, a Rose(TM) "add-in" used to visualize architecturally-significant elements in a system’s design, developed jointly by University of Southern California (USC) and Rational Software. Rose/Architect can be used in forward engineering, marking architecturally significant elements as they are designed and extracting architectural views as necessary. But it can be even more valuable in reverse engineering, i.e., extracting missing key architectural information from a complex model. This model may have been reverse-engineered from source code using the Rose reverse engineering capability.