Experiences from monitoring effects of architectural changes

Abstract

A common situation is that an initial architecture has been sufficient in the initial phases of a project, but when the size and complexity of the product increases the architecture must be changed. In this paper experiences are presented from changing an architecture into independent units, providing basic reuse of main functionality although giving higher priority to independence than reuse. An objective was also to introduce metrics in order to monitor the architectural changes. The change was studied in a case-study through weekly meetings with the team, collected metrics, and questionnaires. The new architecture was well received by the development team, who found it to be less fragile. Concerning the metrics for monitoring it was concluded that a high abstraction level was useful for the purpose.