By Michael Szvetits
Their research focus on the analysis of running systems using models. Basically, their idea is closely related to what I call architecture mining. They use the following framework for model-based analysis:
An important part of modelling and create a better understanding in the system, is by understanding the design decisions. In this work, they performed a literature study to create a taxonomy of design decisions (via an SLR). Next, they validated their taxonomy with industrial people. Not by interviewing, but by giving a case they had to solve, without having the taxonomy. The researchers then checked whether the subjects had novel ideas not yet present in the taxonomy. In the third phase, they applied the taxonomy on the Mars Simulation Project. This project comes with lots of documentation and models (so a great testbed!)