Using Architecturally Significant Requirements for Guiding System Evolution
Ipek
Ozkaya, Andres Diaz-Pace, Arie Gurfinkel, Sagar Chaki,
Proceedings of 14th European Conference on Software
Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR), page 129-138, March 15-18,
2010
Abstract:
Rapidly changing technology is one of the key
triggers of system evolution. Some examples are: physically
relocating a data center; replacement of infrastructure such as
migrating from an in-house broker to CORBA; moving to a
new architectural approach such as migrating from clientserver
to a service-oriented architecture paradigm. At a high
level, the goals of such an evolution are easy to describe. While
the end goals of the evolution are typically captured and
known, the key architecturally significant requirements that
guide the actual evolution tasks are often unexplored. At best,
they are tucked under maintainability and/or modifiability
concerns. In this paper, we argue that eliciting and using
architecturally significant requirements of an evolution has a
potential to significantly improve the quality of the evolution
effort. We focus on elicitation and representation techniques of
architecturally significant evolution requirements, and
demonstrate their use in analysis for evolution.
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