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Automated recommendations for reducing unnecessary variability of technology architectures

Published: 23 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

A technology architecture (TA) represents the technical infrastructure of a company and consists of hardware and software components. As the evolution of such TAs is typically uncoordinated, their complexity often grows with a company’s requirements. As a consequence, a variety of redundancies and architectural variants exist, which are not necessary for the architecture’s purpose. This leads to increased costs and higher effort for evolving and maintaining the entire IT landscape. To alleviate these problems, unnecessary variability has to be identified and reduced. As a manual approach requires high effort and is not feasible for largescale analysis, experts face a major challenge. For this purpose, we propose an automated approach, which provides experts with recommendations for restructurings of related TAs in order to reduce unnecessary variability. We show suitability of our approach by expert interviews and an industrial case study with real-world TAs.

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Cited By

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  • (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

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cover image ACM Conferences
FOSD 2017: Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Feature-Oriented Software Development
October 2017
50 pages
ISBN:9781450355186
DOI:10.1145/3141848
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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Published: 23 October 2017

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Author Tags

  1. recommendation
  2. technology architecture
  3. variability

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Cited By

View all
  • (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

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