Abstract
Software systems are composed of components acquired from different
sources, e.g. subcontractors, component providers, and open source software
providers. Therefore, integrability is one of the most important qualities in
software development. Extensibility is especially important in open source
software systems because they evolve according to the needs of the user
community and often into a direction not originally foreseen. Integrability
evaluation refers to testing if separately developed components work correctly
together. Extensibility evaluation focuses on how new features, originated
from customers’ demands or new emerging technologies, could easily be
developed and exploited in systems without losing existing capabilities. The
impact of changes to the system also has to be estimated. This can be done by
a method called IEE, which enables extensibility and integrability evaluation
from software architectural models. The contribution of this paper is to
introduce the IEE method and illustrate how it is to be used with a real world
case study. In the case study, we applied the IEE in evaluating the
architecture of an existing open source tool. Evaluation revealed a need to
introduce two new extension points to the architecture and also that an
integration framework is needed to integrate the tool under evaluation with
other supporting tools.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1 - 20 |
| Journal | The Open Software Engineering Journal |
| Volume | 1 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2007 |
| MoE publication type | B1 Article in a scientific magazine |
Keywords
- Integrability
- extensibility
- evaluation
- quality
- modeling
- software architecture
- quality-driven
- software family
- open source