A top-down strategy to reverse architecting execution views for a large and complex software-intensive system: An experience report

Abstract

This article is an experience report about the application of a top-down strategy to use and embed an architecture reconstruction approach in the incremental software development process of the Philips MRI scanner, a representative large and complex software-intensive system. The approach is an iterative process to construct execution views without being overwhelmed by the system size and complexity. An execution view contains architectural information that describes what the software of a software-intensive system does at runtime and how it does this. The application of the strategy is illustrated with a case study, the construction of an up-to-date execution view for the start-up process of the Philips MRI scanner. The construction of this view helped the development organization to quickly reduce about 30% the start-up time of the scanner, and set up a new system benchmark for assuring the system performance through future evolution steps. The report provides detailed information about the application of the top-down strategy, including how it supports top-down analysis, communication within the development organization, and the aspects that influence the use of the top-down strategy in other contexts.

A top‐down approach to construct execution views of a large software‐intensive system

“…Figure 11 illustrates and summarizes the size and implementation technology of this system, which demonstrates its complexity and importance as a case study. In our previous work [7,13,22], we reported the results of the approach for dependency analysis, resource usage analysis, and its actual application in practice, respectively. In this section, we summarize the validation of the approach with the construction of a set of execution models that build an execution profile view for the Philips MRI scanner.…”