Component Replacement in a Long-Living Architecture: The 3RDBA Approach

  • Authors:

  • Affiliations:

  • Venue:
  • WICSA '04 Proceedings of the Fourth Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

In order to respond to changing requirements and advancesin technology, system and software architecturesmust evolve during their lifetimes. Usually, in this evolution,several key components of the architecture are replaced.Achieving successful architecture evolution at areasonable cost and effort is difficult. It requires manyarchitectural and technological decisions. This paper describesan approach, called 3RDBA, that facilitates replacinga key component in a long-living architecture. Itis based on systematically gathering all informationneeded to make well-founded decisions regarding evolutionof the architecture. The approach consists of an exploration,consolidation and migration cycle. Each cyclecontains four steps: Requirements, Design, Build andAnalyze. 3RDBA enables construction and evaluation ofseveral alternative architecture realizations together witha migration path from the existing architecture towardsthe selected, new architecture. We describe how we havesuccessfully applied this approach to support the evolutionof a medical imaging system architecture.