Flexibility of the ComB AD* Architecture
N.H. Lassing, D.B.B. Rijsenbrij, Johannes C. van Vliet · 1999
Software architecture is nowadays regarded as the first step to achieving software quality. The architect's main task is to translate quality requirements into a software architecture. An important step is to assess whether the architecture actually satisfies these quality requirements. The purpose of this paper is to explore which architectural choices support flexibility and how flexibility can be assessed. To that end, we explored the ComB AD architecture, whose main objective is flexibility. We investigated the architectural choices made and assessed whether flexibility was achieved. This will not only increase our insight into flexibility in general, but particularly into the assessment of this quality attribute. We use the term flexibility in the broadest sense of the word: to denote adaptability, portability and reusability. Adaptability can be regarded as flexibility in the narrow sense, portability as the flexibility to use a system in various technical environments, and reusability as the flexibility to reuse part of a system in another system.