Architecture styles and services: An experiment involving the signal operations platforms-provisioning operations system

The process of designing vertically integrated applications is enhanced if the distinct architectures, or architecture styles, and relevant performance constraints and interactions can first be identified. Applications, although running in varied environments, also may require specific architecture services, non-operational features such as portability or fault-tolerance that might be common across several architectural styles. The application design process should be an iterative exercise of first understanding system requirements and then determining how they may be partitioned according to styles and services. An integral part of this process is to identify software components and subsystems that must be developed or can be reused from other systems. This paper describes a design-partitioning process applied to the new Signal Operations Platforms-Provisioning (SOP-P) operations system. The experiment shows that it is feasible to identify large design components confined within a few architecture styles that are common to network management and operations software.