Home // PATTERNS 2024, The Sixteenth International Conference on Pervasive Patterns and Applications // View article

Toward a Rejuvenation Factory for Software Landscapes

Authors:
Herwig Mannaert
Tim Van Waes
Frederic Hannes

Keywords: Software Evolvability; Software Factories; Normalized Systems Theory; Case Study.

Abstract:
The agile paradigm has become the default methodology for the delivery of software-based products. While there is a widespread belief that this methodology has numerous benefits, including improved and timely delivery of software projects, it can be argued that the lack of an overall architecture to which developers must adhere can result in increased technical debt. Through its normative structure of software application skeletons, NST (Normalized Systems Theory) provides a possible mechanism to manage the delicate balance between intentional architecture and emerging design. Moreover, the systematic rejuvenation of application skeletons, featuring harvesting and re-injection of custom code, enables to accommodate not only changes in the functional model, but also in the software skeletons, including the technology frameworks that are used. In this contribution, we describe the setup and operations of an NST rejuvenation factory, where dozens of software applications are being developed using agile methodologies, and rejuvenated on an approximately weekly basis. Both the size of the application models, codebase, and technologies, and their evolution in time, are presented. The achieved levels of agility, and the realized abilities to change are discussed, as well as the current limitations and some future work to address them.

Pages: 13 to 18

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2024

Publication date: April 14, 2024

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3557

ISBN: 978-1-68558-161-9

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from April 14, 2024 to April 18, 2024