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 a Reader in Software Engineering and Vice-Dean of Education at Brunel University of London, where she leads the Brunel Software Engineering Lab (BSEL). She is an internationally recognised researcher in software architecture for emerging distributed systems, with over 70 publications in leading journals and conferences.
Her research bridges theory and practice, resulting in innovative tools and methods for understanding and evolving complex software systems. She is known for her work on software architecture recovery, microservices, autonomic systems, and reverse engineering, including the development of the MiSAR and JITTAC tools, which have been applied in industry through funded Knowledge Transfer projects. Her research has also been translated into healthcare applications and has influenced how organisations manage and modernise large-scale software systems.
Dr Ali plays a leading role in the international software engineering community. She serves on the Steering Committee of the European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA) and has held leadership roles including Co-Program Chair of ECSA 2025 and Co-PC Chair of CSEE&T 2027. She is an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College, and a frequent keynote and invited speaker at international conferences. Her current research focuses on generative AI, software architecture, microservices, and healthcare applications.
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