MORPHOSIS: A Lightweight Method Facilitating Sustainable Software Architectures

Abstract

Managing the cost-effective evolution of industrial software systems is a challenging task because of their complexity and long lifetimes. Limited pro-active evolution planning and software architecture erosion often lead to huge maintenance costs in such systems. However, formerly researched approaches for evolution scenario analysis and architecture enforcement are only reluctantly applied by practitioners due to their perceived overhead and high costs. We have applied several recent sustainability evaluation and improvement approaches in a case study to the software architecture of a large industrial software system currently under development at ABB. We combined our selection of approaches in a lightweight method called MORPHOSIS, for which this paper presents experiences and lessons learned. We found that reasonable sustainability evaluation and improvement is possible already with limited efforts.

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“…Later on, some authors agreed that managing the cost-effective evolution of industrial software systems represents a challenge based on their complexity and long lifetimes. As such, Koziolek et al [10] applied several state-of-the-art approaches, to combine them into a holistic lightweight method called MORPHOSIS, which facilitates sustainable software architectures. Consequently, their main focus is sustainability, while our main target is to achieve a proper level of quality that will have impact not only in the sustainability but in the set of quality characteristics included.…”

Product Quality Evaluation Method (PQEM): To Understand the Evolution of Quality Through the Iterations of a Software Product

“…Later on, some authors agreed that managing the cost-effective evolution of industrial software systems represents a challenge based on their complexity and long lifetimes. As such, Koziolek et al [10] applied several state-of-the-art approaches, to combine them into a holistic lightweight method called MORPHOSIS, which facilitates sustainable software architectures. Consequently, their main focus is sustainability, while our main target is to achieve a proper level of quality that will have impact not only in the sustainability but in the set of quality characteristics included.…”

Scenario-based Evolvability Analysis of Service-oriented Systems: A Lightweight and Tool-supported Method

“…While Woods acknowledges that the research community highly values scenarios, he sees their elicitation as too time-consuming. Koziolek et al (2012) proposed another lightweight method called MORPHOSIS. In addition to analyzing the architecture in terms of future development scenarios, MORPHOSIS relies on a reporting framework with several architectural metrics.…”