Architectural knowledge is reflected in various artifacts of a software product. In a software product audit this architectural knowledge needs to be uncovered and its effects assessed in order to evaluate the quality of the software product. A particular problem is to find and comprehend the architectural knowledge that resides in the software product documentation. In this article, we discuss...

Software architects have techniques to deal with many quality attributes such as performance, reliability, and maintainability. Usability, however, has traditionally been concerned primarily with presentation and not been a concern of software architects beyond separating the user interface from the remainder of the application. In this paper, we introduce usabilitysupporting architectural patt...

Background: Open Source Software (OSS) is increasingly used in product development. Besides some much-reported benefits of this approach, using OSS products also presents new challenges. One such challenge is identifying relevant, high-quality OSS products among the hundreds of thousands that are available. One approach for doing that is to identify architectural patterns, since these patterns ...

The use of computer technology to simulate architectural designs is well established in the profession and education. However most software interfaces in this field are intricate and require substantial time input, while the hardware requirements to produce quality animations are continually expanding. This software / hardware ‘squeeze’ can have a detrimental impact in the educational context o...

A Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture is an organization of coordinated autonomous agents that interact in order to achieve particular, possibly common goals. Considering real-world organizations as an analogy, this paper proposes MAS architectural patterns for information systems which adopt concepts from organizational theories. The patterns are modeled using the i* framework which offers t...

Software evolution is inevitable due to changes in requirements and technology. Software quality and productivity are critical to software evolution. Architecture-centric evolution has the advantage of improving quality attributes; however, it does not directly address the issue of the time needed for evolution. This paper proposes an architecture-centric program transformation approach to supp...

For long-lived systems, there is a need to address evolvability (i.e. a system’s ability to easily accommodate changes) explicitly during the entire lifecycle. In this report, we undertake a systematic review to obtain an overview of the existing studies in promoting software evolvability at architectural level. The search strategy identified 3036 studies, of which 54 were catalogued as primary...

Our earlier research indicated the feasibility of applying the PREDIQT method for model-based prediction of impacts of architectural design changes on system quality. The PREDIQT method develops and makes use of so called prediction models, a central part of which are the “Dependency Views” (DVs) – weighted trees representing the relationships between architectural design and the quality charac...

Software architecture is the most important artifact in the software life cycle. The architectural description and the architectural design decide the quality and the longevity of the software. The design decisions made to arrive at a particular software architecture decide the value of quality attributes such as performance, reliability, security and modifiability. Also the percentage of desig...

Even providing several benefits and facilities with regard to teaching and learning, mobile learning environments present problems and challenges that must be investigated, especially with respect to the definition and standardization of architectural aspects. Most of these environments are still built in isolation, with particular structures and architectures, hindering aspects such as reuse a...