Scaling up software architecture evaluation processes

  • Authors:

  • Liming Zhu;Mark Staples;Ross Jeffery

  • Affiliations:

  • NICTA, Eveleigh, NSW, Australia and School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Australia;NICTA, Eveleigh, NSW, Australia and School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Australia;NICTA, Eveleigh, NSW, Australia and School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Australia

  • Venue:
  • ICSP'08 Proceedings of the Software process, 2008 international conference on Making globally distributed software development a success story
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

As software systems become larger and more decentralized, increasinglycross organizational boundaries and continue to change, traditional structuraland prescriptive software architectures are becoming more rule-centric forbetter accommodating changes and regulating distributed design and developmentprocesses. This is particularly true for Ultra-Large-Scale (ULS) systemsand industry-wide reference architectures. However, existing architecturedesign and evaluation processes have mainly been designed for structural architectureand do not scale up to large and complex system of systems. In this paper,we propose a new software architecture evaluation process - EvaluationProcess for Rule-centric Architecture (EPRA). EPRA reuses and tailors existingproven architecture analysis process components and scales up to complexsoftware-intensive system of systems. We exemplify EPRA's use in an architectureevaluation exercise for a rule-centric industry reference architecture.