A Systematic Review on Architecting for Software Evolvability

Hongyu Pei Breivold, Ivica Crnkovic
2010 2010 21st Australian Software Engineering Conference  
For long-lived systems, there is a need to address evolvability (i.e. a system's ability to easily accommodate changes) explicitly during the entire lifecycle. In this paper, we undertake a systematic review to obtain an overview of the existing studies in promoting software evolvability at architectural level. The search strategy identified 58 studies that were catalogued as primary studies for this review after using multi-step selection process. The studies are classified into five main
more » ... ories of themes, including techniques that support quality considerations during software architecture design, architectural quality evaluation, economic valuation, architectural knowledge management and modeling techniques. The review investigates what is currently known about architecting software evolvability at architecture level. Implications for research and practice are presented. Method This study is undertaken as a systematic literature review based on the original guidelines as proposed by Kitchenham [29]. The study includes several stages: (i) development of a review protocol; (ii) identification of inclusion and exclusion criteria; (iii) the search process for relevant publications; (iv) quality assessment; (v) data extraction and synthesis. Review protocol We formulated a review protocol based on the guidelines and procedures as proposed in [29] . This protocol specifies the background for the review, research questions, search strategy, study selection criteria, strategy for data extraction and synthesis.
doi:10.1109/aswec.2010.11 dblp:conf/aswec/BreivoldC10 fatcat:ulnian6acvg4xbusnpl5q4yhnq