Architectural flexibility in a software-system's life-cycle

Abstract

Software evolution is omnipresent and only with adequate flexibility it can be mastered in time and budget. Flexibility is supported by many architectural mechanisms, but more methodological support for a life-cycle-phases bridging approach of flexibility is still desirable. Therefore, in this paper we contribute a life-cycle-phases bridging approach for flexibility. Our approach supports architects during system design to achieve flexibility and during system evolution to exploit flexibility. We build on existing flexibility analysis techniques and extend them to give architects specific guidance and tool-support. For architecture design, we introduce an automated flexibility analysis with real-time feedback in architecture tools. For software evolution we provide a flexibility exploitation analysis which builds up on the results of the design time analysis and enables effective utilization of provided flexibility by deriving flexibility-aware work-plans. We demonstrate our approach by applying it to a checkin system, report first validation results from an empirical study and propose further validation activities.

Stability in Software Engineering: Survey of the State-of-the-Art and Research Directions

“…Flexibility is "the ease with which a system or component can be modified for use in applications or environments other than those for which it was specifically designed" [39]. Flexibility is mainly about future changes of software and is considered relative to these expected changes, similar to modifiability [106]. Distinguishing it from other properties like adaptivity and changeability, flexibility is defined as "the property of a software system to allow conducting certain changes to the system with acceptable effort for modifying the system's implementation artefacts" [106].…”