ARCHITECTING AN EVOLVABLE SYSTEM BY ITERATIVE OBJECT-PROCESS MODELING

Session Speakers: Ashirul Mubin, Daniel Ray

System analysis and its product development are often configured within the context of current and near-future needs of business processes and system requirements. However, the long term evolutionary needs for a system to be able to meet new and emerging requirements are often left unnoticed, since the complete picture is not apparently visible at the time of analysis. Therefore, over a long period of time, many of these systems become obsolete, because their lifecycles cannot be extended or are very expensive to re-engineer into a reusable system that could actually meet the new requirements. To overcome such difficulties, we present a methodology to build a wrapper-system based on the iterative Object-Process modeling scheme. The purpose of the wrapper-system is to coordinate three services: first, to collect the evolving factors from the system's current state information; second, to update system's meta-model based on the evolving factors, and third, to apply necessary changes to the system for its evolution into its next iteration to meet new requirements. From our analyses of the system usage activity logs and update-request history for five different projects over two to three years of time, we conclude that a generic iterative scheme can be effectively applied for architecting evolvable systems with much longer life expectancy.