Björn Lundell

Taking Steps to Improve Working Practice: A Company Experience of Method Transfer

Methods are vital for systems development in companies, but their effective transfer into practice necessitates an understanding of the many factors affecting success. It can be extremely expensive to adopt a method in order to evaluate its suitability for a given context; what is required is a progressive commitment according to feedback. This paper documents the experience of progressive method transfer within one company.

Communicating Architectural Design Rules Using Models - An Action Case Study

An important purpose of architectural design is to ensure that the system meets its quality requirements by defining a set of system wide design decisions. An important part of these design decisions is the set of architectural design rules that shall be followed by developers in the detailed design. The state of practice is to define these rules in natural language and to use manual reviews to enforce them. This way of transferring the rules to the developers is however error prone and requires a lot of effort from the architects since natural language is ambiguous and open for different interpretations and rule following have to be checked with manual reviews. This paper reports from an action case study where a novel approach for architectural modeling and automated conformance checking has been investigated regarding its ability to better communicate architectural design decisions to the developers. The findings indicate that the novel approach is significantly more effective than the state of practice. The findings also show that an important reason for this is that using a tool for conformance checking allows the developers to learn the rules by experimenting.