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Bauhaus offers an interactive and incremental method to component mining integrating a large number of automatic techniques. Here are the main steps of the method:

The component mining cycle, consisting of analysis selection, application and combination, presentation, and bookkeeping of detected components, is the core of the detection process. The user controls the detection process by selecting analyses and adjusting their parameters and by validating the candidates proposed by the automatic techniques. The task of the computer comprises the generation of the base view from source code (contains all global declarations of the system and their dependencies), automatic component clustering techniques, computation of the metrics for the proposed candidates, presentation of the results, and bookkeeping of the user decisions.

In each iteration, the user selects and combines different techniques to find components that could not be found by previous techniques. The user may also apply several techniques in parallel. Then, the intersection, union, and differences of these techniques can automatically be ascertained and the user can investigate and validate these.

This method combines the human expertise both in the programming and application domain with fully automatic techniques.