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A method for reengineering software architectures is presented in this paper. The method explicitly addresses the quality attributes of the software architecture. Assessment of quality attributes is performed primarily through the use of scenarios. Design transformations are used to improve quality attributes that do not satisfy the requirements. Assessment and design transformation can be performed for several iterations until all requirements are met. To illustrate the method, the reengineering of a prototypical measurement system into a domainspecific software architecture is used as an example.

A method for the prediction of software maintainability during software architecture design is presented. The method takes (1) the requirement specification, (2) the design of the architecture (3) expertise from software engineers and, possibly, (4) historical data as input and generates a prediction of the average effort for a maintenance task. Scenarios are used by the method to concretize the maintainability requirements and to analyze the architecture for the prediction of the maintainability. The method is formulated based on extensive experience in software architecture design and detailed design and exemplified using the design of software architecture for a haemo dialysis machine. Experiments for evaluation and validation of the method are ongoing and future work.

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Over the last decade, several authors have studied the maintainability of software architecture. In particular, the assessment of maintainability has received attention. However, even when one has a quantitative assessment of the maintainability of a software architecture, one still does not have any indication of the optimality of the software architecture with respect to this quality attribute. Typically, the software architect is supposed to judge the assessment result based on his or her personal experience. In this paper, we propose a technique for analysing the optimal maintainability of a software architecture based on a specified scenario profile. This technique allows software architects to analyse the maintainability of their software architecture with respect to the optimal maintainability. The technique is illustrated and evaluated using industrial cases.