Multi-View architecture trend analysis for medical imaging

We show how two web-based architecture trend analysis tools, considering different views and their changes over time, contribute to our daily effort to cope with the complexity of a large, software-intensive medical imaging system. 1 Summary of the presentation Philips Medical Systems develops large SW-intensive embedded imaging systems, comprising hundreds of hardware and software components. To be competitive in the market, the development process must meet several demanding and often conflicting requirements: high product quality, short time-to-market and low costs. Success depends, among other things, on an appropriately managed software architecture. Software architecture can be described by four related views [2], i.e. conceptual, module interconnection, code and execution architecture. Software architects take the responsibility for specifying these views correctly and keeping them consistent. To manage the software architecture, architects and designers continuously need up-to-date information about ongoing activities, problems that arise, and recent progress. This information can be related to any of the views mentioned above, and must be structured in such a way that navigation from general to more detailed information is possible and dependencies between different views can easily be traced. Considering the huge amount of available data, adequate tool support is needed to collect, process and present the required information. We describe first experiences with two trend analysis tools, which are integrated in the daily software development process. One is the Code and Module Architecture Dashboard (CMAD) for monitoring changes of different code, module, and interconnection metrics organized according to the module hierarchy. The other, called Execu