Improving the Modifiability of the Architecture of Business Applications

Abstract

In the current rapidly changing business environment, organizations must keep on changing their business applications to maintain their competitive edges. Therefore, the modifiability of a business application is critical to the success of organizations. Software architecture plays an important role in ensuring a desired modifiability of business applications. However, few approaches exist to automatically assess and improve the modifiability of software architectures. Generally speaking, existing approaches rely on software architects to design software architecture based on their experience and knowledge. In this paper, we build on our prior work on automatic generation of software architectures from business processes and propose a collection of model transformation rules to automatically improve the modifiability of software architectures. We extend a set of existing product metrics to assess the modifiability impact of the proposed model transformation rules and guide the quality improvement process. Eventually, we can generate software architecture with desired modifiability from business processes. We conduct a case study to illustrate the effectiveness of our transformation rules.