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Variability Mining of Technical Architectures

Published: 25 September 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Technical architectures (TAs) represent the computing infrastructure of a company with all its hardware and software components. Over the course of time, the number of TAs grows with the companies' requirements and usually a large variety of TAs has to be maintained. Core challenge is the missing information on relations between the existing variants of TAs, which complicates reuse of solutions across systems. However, identifying these relations is an expensive task as architects have to manually analyze each TA individually. Restructuring the existing TAs poses severe risks as often sufficient information is not available (e.g., due to time constraints). To avoid failures in productive systems and resulting loss of profit, companies continue to create new solutions without restructuring existing ones. This increased variability in TAs represents technical debt. In this paper, we adapt the idea of variability mining from the software product line domain and present an efficient and automatic mining algorithm to identify the common and varying parts of TAs by analyzing a potentially arbitrary number of TAs in parallel. Using the identified variability information, architects are capable of analyzing the relations of TAs, identifying reuse potential, and making well-founded maintenance decisions. We show the feasibility and scalability of our approach by applying it to a real-world industrial case study with large sets of TAs.

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  • (2024)Towards Method Support for Variability Modelling in Enterprise Architecture ManagementPerspectives in Business Informatics Research10.1007/978-3-031-71333-0_8(119-134)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
  • (2023)The e4CompareFrameworkProceedings of the 27th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume B10.1145/3579028.3609012(34-38)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2023
  • (2023)True Variability Shining Through Taxonomy MiningProceedings of the 27th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A10.1145/3579027.3608989(182-193)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2023
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cover image ACM Other conferences
SPLC '17: Proceedings of the 21st International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A
September 2017
253 pages
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 25 September 2017

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Author Tags

  1. enterprise architecture
  2. technical architecture
  3. variability mining

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SPLC '17

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Overall Acceptance Rate 167 of 463 submissions, 36%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Towards Method Support for Variability Modelling in Enterprise Architecture ManagementPerspectives in Business Informatics Research10.1007/978-3-031-71333-0_8(119-134)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
  • (2023)The e4CompareFrameworkProceedings of the 27th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume B10.1145/3579028.3609012(34-38)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2023
  • (2023)True Variability Shining Through Taxonomy MiningProceedings of the 27th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A10.1145/3579027.3608989(182-193)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2023
  • (2021)Deployment of Information Technology Governance Using Architectural FrameworkEmpowering Businesses With Collaborative Enterprise Architecture Frameworks10.4018/978-1-5225-8229-8.ch009(199-215)Online publication date: 2021
  • (2020)Empirical software product line engineeringInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2020.106389128:COnline publication date: 1-Dec-2020
  • (2020)Towards Multiple Model Synchronization with Comprehensive SystemsFundamental Approaches to Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-45234-6_17(335-356)Online publication date: 17-Apr-2020
  • (2019)A bottom-up approach for reconstructing software architecture product linesProceedings of the 13th European Conference on Software Architecture - Volume 210.1145/3344948.3344964(46-49)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2019
  • (2018)Reducing variability of technically related software systems in large-scale IT landscapesProceedings of the 28th Annual International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering10.5555/3291291.3291314(224-235)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2018
  • (2018)Reverse engineering variability in an industrial product lineProceedings of the 22nd International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume 110.1145/3233027.3233047(215-225)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2018
  • (2017)Automated recommendations for reducing unnecessary variability of technology architecturesProceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Feature-Oriented Software Development10.1145/3141848.3141849(1-10)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2017

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