Evolutionary Architecting of Software-Intensive Systems

Most industrial software-intensive systems have a very long life span, and undergo many changes after their initial conception. To ensure that they maintain the desired system-level properties, it is essential that their architecture is also updated to reflect the added functionality. To this end, we have investigated how Evolutionary Architecting should be carried out in order to provide a strong basis for a system, not only at conception but throughout its life. The results are concrete and based on empirical findings, and include both a new state-of-the-art process description and a light-weight maturity evaluation method.