Software Engineering significantly matured in the last decades, but still many projects suffer from delays, exceed their budget, do not reach their quality goals, or even fail. We experienced that many industrial projects suffer from a misalignment of software architecture and software project plan. Other engineering disciplines like manufacturing put specific focus on aligning product design and production plan to prevent problems during production. In this thesis, we introduce the alignment of software architecture and software project plan as a new quality property of software called producibility and propose a method to analyze the producibility of a software product. The producibility analysis method semi-automatically detects critical architectural elements and project planning elements like work activities, iterations, or assigned resources that are supposed to cause delays or effort overhead during realization of a software product. In an industrial case study, we identified more than 90% of critical elements up-front. We determined based on estimates of the project team that we could have saved 29% of time in the first of two iterations.

To fully leverage the value of software architecture in enterprise development projects, you need to expressly and consciously link architecture with project management. This book shows how, drawing on powerful lessons learned at Siemens, one of the world's leading software development organizations. The authors offer insight into project management for software architects, insight into software architecture for project managers, and above all, insight into integrating the two disciplines to maximize the effectiveness of both of them. Learn how to develop cost and schedule estimates for development projects, based on software architecture; how to clarify architecture so projects can be more effectively planned and managed; and then how to use architecture to organize, implement, and measure the project iteratively as work progresses.

Architecture-centric development is a novel software paradigm that uses software architecture as a centerpiece to drive other development activities, such as program development and testing. Existing studies in this area are limited to the conceptual analysis of architecture-centric development. In this project, we propose to perform an empirical study based on an existing architecture mapping approach. To that end, we used a video game application as a case study. We recovered and developed an architectural model for this game application using the ArchStudio and xMapper software toolset. We made some modifications to the game using the architecture-centric approach. The result shows that architecture-centric development is applicable to the implementation of a real software system and can automatically maintain architecture-implementation conformance. The study allows us to further analyze architecture-centric development practically for other different applications. The architecture-based system that we developed can also facilitate the future research of software architecture.

This cumulative habilitation thesis, proposes concepts for (i) modelling and analysing dependability based on architectural models of software-intensive systems early in development, (ii) decomposition and composition of modelling languages and analysis techniques to enable more flexibility in evolution, and (iii) bridging the divergent levels of abstraction between data of the operation phase, architectural models and source code of the development phase.

This open access book presents the outcomes of the “Design for Future – Managed Software Evolution” priority program 1593, which was launched by the German Research Foundation (“Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)”) to develop new approaches to software engineering with a specific focus on long-lived software systems. The different lifecycles of software and hardware platforms lead to interoperability problems in such systems. Instead of separating the development, adaptation and evolution of software and its platforms, as well as aspects like operation, monitoring and maintenance, they should all be integrated into one overarching process. Accordingly, the book is split into three major parts, the first of which includes an introduction to the nature of software evolution, followed by an overview of the specific challenges and a general introduction to the case studies used in the project. The second part of the book consists of the main chapters on knowledge carrying software, and cover tacit knowledge in software evolution, continuous design decision support, model-based round-trip engineering for software product lines, performance analysis strategies, maintaining security in software evolution, learning from evolution for evolution, and formal verification of evolutionary changes. In turn, the last part of the book presents key findings and spin-offs. The individual chapters there describe various case studies, along with their benefits, deliverables and the respective lessons learned. An overview of future research topics rounds out the coverage. The book was mainly written for scientific researchers and advanced professionals with an academic background. They will benefit from its comprehensive treatment of various topics related to problems that are now gaining in importance, given the higher costs for maintenance and evolution in comparison to the initial development, and the fact that today, most software is not developed from scratch, but as part of a continuum of former and future releases.

Abstract: "The Rational Unified Process (RUP) is used broadly by software developers. This technical report fits the Carnegie Mellon[registered trademark] Software Engineering Institute's (SEI's) architecture-centric methods into the framework of the RUP. These methods include the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method[registered trademark], the SEI Quality Attribute Workshop, the SEI Attribute-Driven Design method, the SEI Cost Benefit Analysis Method, and SEI Active Reviews for Intermediate Design. Since the key process milestone of the Elaboration Phase of the RUP is a completed architecture, the architecture-centric methods appear early in the process during the first two phases (i.e., Inception and Elaboration). This report presents a summary of the RUP and then examines the potential uses of the SEI's architecture-centric methods."