Demonstration of MiSAR reverse-engineering microservice architectures from source, tackling architectural drift with automated analysis.
Speaker
Dr Nour Ali
Agenda
6:00pm - Networking in BCS London over refreshments
6:30pm - Presentation begins, questions and answers
8:00pm - Networking in BCS London (pizza & refreshments)
8:45pm - Everyone off the premises - adjourn to The Old Doctor Butler's Head
Synopsis
As microservice-based systems grow in scale and complexity, maintaining an accurate picture of how services interact becomes increasingly difficult.
MiSAR (Microservice Architecture Recovery) is a tool developed at Brunel University of London that automatically reconstructs a system's architecture from source code and configuration files, producing accurate service dependency models and visual architectural diagrams.
The talk will cover:
The challenge of architectural drift and missing documentation in microservice systems.
How MiSAR works and what models it generates.
A live demo of the tool on a system.
Findings from our practitioner evaluation study.
An invitation for practitioners to trial the tool and provide feedback.
About the speaker
Dr Nour Ali is an academic software engineer and leading researcher in software architecture for emerging distributed paradigms, with over 70 publications in leading journals and conferences. She has built an international reputation through rigorous research that bridges theory and practice. She has developed pragmatic reverse engineering tools - most notably MiSAR and Jittac - grounded in empirical work and used across industry through funded Knowledge Transfer projects.
Her research on autonomic systems has been applied in healthcare settings, while her work on microservice architecture recovery has fundamentally shaped how organisations understand, evolve, and optimise complex systems at scale.
Beyond her own research, Nour shapes the international software engineering agenda in significant leadership roles: she serves on the steering committee of the European Conference on Software Architecture and is Co-PC Chair for CSEE&T 2027. She has previously served as Co-PC Chair for ECSA 2025 and Euromicro SEAA 2024, and as Tutorial Track co-chair for ICSE 2025. She is recognised as a spotlight researcher and serves on the MDENet advisory board and has delivered keynote presentations and invited talks at major conferences.
She holds editorial positions including Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, reviews for 10 prestigious journals, and is a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College. At Brunel University London, she is Vice Dean of Education and leads the Brunel Software Engineering Lab (BSEL), where she supervises PhD students and mentors academic researchers. Her current focus is on generative AI, microservices architecture and applications in healthcare. is an academic software engineer and leading researcher in software architecture for emerging distributed paradigms, with over 70 publications in leading journals and conferences.
She has built an international reputation through rigorous research that bridges theory and practice. She has developed pragmatic reverse engineering tools - most notably MiSAR and Jittac - grounded in empirical work and used across industry through funded Knowledge Transfer projects. Her research on autonomic systems has been applied in healthcare settings, while her work on microservice architecture recovery has fundamentally shaped how organisations understand, evolve, and optimise complex systems at scale. Beyond her own research, Nour shapes the international software engineering agenda in significant leadership roles: she serves on the steering committee of the European Conference on Software Architecture and is Co-PC Chair for CSEE&T 2027. She has previously served as Co-PC Chair for ECSA 2025 and Euromicro SEAA 2024, and as Tutorial Track co-chair for ICSE 2025.
She is recognised as a spotlight researcher and serves on the MDENet advisory board and has delivered keynote presentations and invited talks at major conferences. She holds editorial positions including Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, reviews for 10 prestigious journals, and is a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College. At Brunel University London, she is Vice Dean of Education and leads the Brunel Software Engineering Lab (BSEL), where she supervises PhD students and mentors academic researchers. Her current focus is on generative AI, microservices architecture and applications in healthcare.
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