Post-development software architecture

Abstract

Software architecture (SA) plays an important role in software development. Since the lifecycle stages post development become more and more important and face with many challenges similar to the development, it is a natural idea to introduce or extend SA into the stages post development. In this paper, we present our practices and experiences on applying software architecture into the deployment and maintenance of J2EE (Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition) applications, including the tool and principles of SA-based J2EE deployment and SA-based J2EE online maintenance. It demonstrates that 1) SA can help to achieve a holistic, fine-grained and automated deployment of large-scale distributed systems by visualizing the structure of the system to be deployed; 2) SA can provide an understandable, operational and global view for online maintenance by organizing the fragmented and trivial management mechanisms; 3) Extending SA into the stages post development makes it possible that the whole lifecycle of a software system can be governed by SA with many benefits, e.g. consistency, traceability, responsiveness, etc.