System Evolution Barriers and How to Overcome Them!

Creating complex systems from scratch is time consuming and costly, therefore a strategy often chosen by companies is to evolve existing systems. Yet evolving a system is also complicated. Complex systems are usually the result of multidisciplinary teams, therefore it is essential to understand barriers those teams face when evolving a system.\ud From the research carried at Philips Healthcare MRI, we have identified that main evolution barriers employees face are; managing system complexity,communication across disciplines and departments, finding the necessary system information, lack of system overview, and ineffective knowledge sharing. Those barriers were identified as the root cause of many development problems and bad decisions.\ud To overcome those barriers, and therefore enhance the evolution process, effective reuse of knowledge is essential. This knowledge must be presented in a fashion that can be understood by a broad set of stakeholders. In this paper system evolution barriers and a method to effectively deal with them, based on the creation of A3 Architecture Overviews, is presented

Communication: key factor in multidisciplinary system design

System design research often looks at ways to model the system that is developing. Many modelling techniques and model representations exist. Another aspect these models can be used for is to enable, facilitate and improve communication among the developers during the process. The young System Design Group at the faculty of Engineering Technology of the University of Twente, the Netherlands, aims at focusing on this communication aspect in system design.\ud In the paper, a few finished and running projects undertaken in close cooperation with industry are described concisely. From these projects three research themes are derived. These are: creation of high-level models, combining model representations and condense information. The paper ends with plans for future research

Coping with system evolution - experiences in reverse architecting as a means to ease the evolution of complex systems

Creating systems from scratch is time consuming and costly, therefore companies often choose to evolve existing systems. The understanding that a company has about the impact that a change has in the system architecture determines their ability to cope with system evolution. System architects and designers need to have an architecture representation that enables them to understand and to foresee consequences of evolving the system. This representation however is often not documented. Reverse architecting enables to recover the architecture representation. In this paper, experiences in reverse architecting in a industrial case at Philips Healthcare MRI Group is presented. We show that the proposed approach provides an effective framework to reason about evolvability and impact that design changes has on the system