Coping with System Evolution -Experiences in Reverse Architecting as aMeans to Ease the Evolution of ComplexSystems

摘要

Creating systems from scratch is time consuming and costly, thereforerncompanies often choose to evolve existing systems. The understanding that a companyrnhas about the impact that a change has in the system architecture determines their abilityrnto cope with system evolution.rnSystem architects and designers need to have an architecture representation that enablesrnthem to understand and to foresee consequences of evolving the system. Thisrnrepresentation however is often not documented. Reverse architecting enables tornrecover the architecture representation. In this paper, experiences in reverse architectingrnin a industrial case at Philips Healthcare MRI Group is presented. We show that thernproposed approach provides an effective framework to reason about evolvability andrnimpact that design changes has on the system.