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6.2.3 Coping with System Evolution ‐ Experiences in Reverse Architecting as a Means to Ease the Evolution of Complex Systems *
Author(s) -
Borches P. Daniel,
Bonnema G. Maarten
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
incose international symposium
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2334-5837
DOI - 10.1002/j.2334-5837.2009.tb00994.x
Subject(s) - evolvability , architecture , computer science , representation (politics) , software engineering , systems engineering , engineering , art , evolutionary biology , politics , political science , law , visual arts , biology
Creating systems from scratch is time consuming and costly, therefore companies often choose to evolve existing systems. The understanding that a company has about the impact that a change has in the system architecture determines their ability to cope with system evolution. System architects and designers need to have an architecture representation that enables them to understand and to foresee consequences of evolving the system. This representation however is often not documented. Reverse architecting enables to recover the architecture representation. In this paper, experiences in reverse architecting in a industrial case at Philips Healthcare MRI Group is presented. We show that the proposed approach provides an effective framework to reason about evolvability and impact that design changes has on the system.