Abstract
Creating complex systems from scratch is time consuming and costly, therefore a development strategy often chosen by companies is to evolve existing systems. Reuse of existing knowledge and experience becomes essential to support the evolution process. Complex systems are usually the result of multidisciplinary teams, which means that an effective way to capture, organize and present this knowledge, in a fashion that can be used by different stakeholders is crucial. Typically, some of this knowledge is present in the form of text documents. However, much of that knowledge is usually hidden or lost, especially in long-lived systems. This leads to unexpected problems that could be prevented if the company reuses the knowledge it already has. An approach, based on the creation of A3 Architecture Overviews by an architecting method, is proposed to capture and share key architectural knowledge, enhancing communication and understanding among team members. We show that the proposed method to capture architectural knowledge provides an effective framework to support decision making when evolving complex systems.
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Notes
- 1.
It is important to distinguish between levels of abstraction. Different parts of the life-cycle may need different levels of detail.
- 2.
Model: An approximation, representation or idealization of selected aspects of the structure, behaviour, operation or characteristics of a real-world process, concept or system (IEEE 610.12-1990).
- 3.
Visual models and pictures are, as they say, worth a thousand words each. Consequently, as the room to display information is limited, it is encouraged to use them also in the text summary.
- 4.
The term ‘Function’ can be interpreted in many ways. We have used this term in the sense ‘a specific or discrete action that is necessary to achieve a given objective’ (Blanchard and Frabryky 1998).
- 5.
For maintainability reasons, one person should be responsible for collecting all A3s and establish the links among them, as well as their hierarchy. However the creation of individual A3s and their update should be responsibility of A3 Architecture Overview authors.
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Acknowledgements
This research was conducted in cooperation with the MRI group of Philips Healthcare. We thank all the experts from Philips Healthcare MRI for their support and contributions. We want to thank specially Phil van Liere for the time and effort dedicated to this project. We also want to thank the support of Gerrit Muller and other members of the Darwin project.
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Borches, P.D. (2010). A3 Architecture Overviews. In: Van de Laar, P., Punter, T. (eds) Views on Evolvability of Embedded Systems. Embedded Systems. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9849-8_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9849-8_8
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