Building on a formal theory of the structural aspects of organizational change initiated in Hannan, Pólos, and Carroll (2002a, 2002b), this paper focuses on structural inertia. We define inertia as a persistent organizational resistance to changing architectural features. We examine the evolutionary consequences of architectural inertia. The main theorem holds that selection favors architectura...

This chapter presents an initial “4+1” theory of value-based software engineering (VBSE). The engine in the center is the stakeholder win-win Theory W, which addresses the questions of “which values are important?” and “how is success assured?” for a given software engineering enterprise. The four additional theories that it draws upon are utility theory (how important are the values?), decisio...

This paper deals with self-adapting software that is structured according to a control theory architecture. Such software contains, in addition to its main function, two components a Controller and a Quality-of-Service module. We show an example of an application and analyze the mapping of this application onto various control theory-based architectures. The application is a radar-based target ...

The design of architectural environments has to take into account various sources of heterogeneous information. Not only quantitative spatial constraints and qualitative relations but also functionally-dependent and abstract conceptualizations are relevant aspects for architectural design. We aim at a modular ontological approach based on the theory of E-connections to formally present and brin...

We take the position that it could prove worth to reconcile ideas of the knowledge representation and software architecture research communities. Many existing knowledge representation techniques and formalisms seem to exhibit a lot of potential for representing different aspects of software architectures. To illustrate our case, we show how the theory of conceptual graphs could be a useful can...

This paper presents the results of a survey to assess the extent of use of safety architectural patterns in Logica to solve commonly reoccurring problems in the safety domain. A number of Logica safety related projects, active during August 2011, were considered to establish which specific patterns had been used so a profile of pattern use could be established along with a view of their perceiv...