Experiences with SAA of Modifiability.

Modifiability is an important quality for software systems, because a large part of the costs associated with these systems is spent on modifications. The effort, and therefore cost, that is required for these modifications is largely determined by a system’s software architecture. Analysis of software architectures is therefore an important technique to achieve modifiability and reduce maintenance costs. However, few techniques for software architecture analysis currently exist. Based on our experiences with software architecture analysis of modifiability, we have developed an analysis method consisting of five steps. In this paper we report on our experiences with this method. We illustrate our experiences with examples from two case studies of SAA of modifiability. These case studies concern a system for mobile positioning at Ericsson Software Techology and a system for freight handling at DFDS Fraktarna. Our experiences are related to each step of the analysis process. In addition, we made some observations on SAA of modifiability in general.