Architectural Design for Flexibility and Buildability to Facilitate Evolution

Abstract

Business information systems need to evolve continuously in order to keep pace with changing requirements and preserve an organization’s competitiveness. We have identified flexibility and buildability as key qualities facilitating evolution. Flexibility and buildability requirements should be addressed as soon as possible during architectural design to enable them to be satisfied efficiently and effectively. However, today many organizations do not sufficiently address flexibility and buildability, especially not in combination, either because they are not fully aware of their importance or because methodological support regarding design for flexibility and buildability is often not appropriate (if available at all). In this paper, we introduce an approach aimed at design for flexibility and buildability to facilitate the evolution of software.