Flexible Working Architectures: Agile Architecting Using PPCs

Abstract

Abstract. Software systems need software architectures to improve their scalability and maintenance. However, many agile practitioners claim that the upfront design of software architectures is an investment that does not pay off, since customers can rarely appreciate the value delivered by architectures. Furthermore, conventional architectural practices may be considered unacceptable from the Agile values and principles perspective. In this paper, the development of working architectures in agile iterations is presented as an attempt to solve the problem of designing software architectures in Agile. This contribution is based on the new concept of Plastic Partial Component (PPC). PPCs are highly malleable components that can be partially described, what increases the flexibility of architecture design. PPCs based architectures let reinforce some of the agile values and principles. Our experience of putting this contribution into practice is illustrated through the agile development of a Testing Framework for Biogas Plants.

A model for tracing variability from features to product-line architectures: a case study in smart grids

“…Additionally, PPCs reduce dependences and coupling between components and their variants, and enable easy and cheap (un-)weaving of variants. These advantages have been successfully applied to SPLs [45,44,17].…”

Change-Impact Driven Agile Architecting

“…It was defined in a previous work to explicitly specify the architectures that realize SPL. This metamodel and their underlying concepts allow one to iteratively and incrementally construct and evolve software architectures based on two properties that they provide: flexibility and adaptability [23] [12].…”

“…The variability of a PPC is specified using variability points, which hook fragments of code to the PPC known as variants, and weavings which specify where and when extending the PPCs using the variants (see Figure l.a). As variability facilitates the planned evolutionary software development [15], agile architects can take advantage of the PPC primitives for incrementally and iteratively refine the architectural components that compose a working architecture 3 [23]. The PPC variability mechanism is the backbone to support incremental development of architectural components through the incomplete specification of components, and their extension by hooking new variants.…”

“…This CIA technique was deployed in the agile method Scrum [29] and built on the results from previous works [23][11] that provide flexible mechanisms to design iteratively and incrementally software architectures.…”

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

“…al. [13] define flexible working architectures as a kind of prepared architectures based on AOP that can be refined to particular system needs at design time. However, this is no universal support for flexibility as the solution aspect of aspect-orientation is in the focus.…”