Analyzing Software Architectures for Modifiability.

Abstract

Several studies have shown that 50% to 70% of the total lifecycle cost for a software system is spent on evolving the system. Since incorporating anticipated changes generally requires considerably less effort than unanticipated changes, it is important to prepare a software system for likely changes during development. The software architecture plays an important role in achieving this, but few methods for modifiability analysis exist. In this paper, we propose an analysis method for software architecture modifiability that has successfully been applied in several cases. The method consists of five main steps, i.e. goal selection, software architecture description, scenario elicitation, scenario evaluation and interpretation.