Toward Design Decisions to Enable Deployability Empirical Study of Three Projects Reaching for the Continuous Delivery Holy Grail

<p>There is growing interest in continuous delivery practices to enable rapid and reliable deployment. While practices are important, we suggest architectural design decisions are equally important for projects to achieve goals such continuous integration (CI) build, automated testing and reduced deployment-cycle time. Architectural design decisions that conflict with deployability goals can impede the team’s ability to achieve the desired state of deployment and may result in substantial technical debt. To explore this assertion, we interviewed three project teams striving to practicing continuous delivery. In this paper, we summarize examples of the deployability goals for each project as well as the architectural decisions that they have made to enable deployability. We present the deployability goals, design decisions, and deployability tactics collected and summarize the design tactics derived from the interviews in the form of an initial draft version hierarchical deployability tactic tree.</p

Enabling Incremental Iterative Development at Scale: Quality Attribute Refinement and Allocation in Practice

Software Engineering Institut

Improving Quality Using Architecture Fault Analysis with Confidence Arguments

<p>This case study shows how an analytical architecture fault-modeling approach can be combined with confidence arguments to diagnose a time-sensitive design error in a control system and to provide evidence that proposed changes to the system address the problem. The analytical approach, based on the SAE Architecture Analysis and Design Language for its well-defined timing and fault behavior semantics, demonstrates that such hard-to-test errors can be discovered and corrected early in the lifecycle, thereby reducing rework cost. The case study shows that by combining the analytical approach with confidence maps, we can present a structured argument that system requirements have been met and problems in the design have been addressed adequately—increasing our confidence in the system quality. The case study analyzes an aircraft engine control system that manages fuel flow with a stepper motor. The original design was developed and verified in a commercial model-based development environment without discovering the potential for missed step commanding. During system tests, actual fuel flow did not correspond to the desired fuel flow under certain circumstances. The problem was traced to missed execution of commanded steps due to variation in execution time.</p