Preparing for Change in the Architec- ture Design of Large Software Systems

Architecture is influenced by organizational factors, market forces, and technology that are constantly changing. We found that successful architects analyze factors that have a global influence to produce an architecture that localizes the effects of change. Change is a fundamental property of all factors that influence the architecture. To account for the influence of change we identified a global analysis task that captures the factors an architect considers when designing an architecture. We are describing four industry software systems using this analysis approach.