Defining execution viewpoints for a large and complex software-intensive system

An execution view is an important asset for developing large and complex systems. An execution view helps practitioners to describe, analyze, and communicate what a software system does at runtime and how it does it. In this paper, we present an approach to define execution viewpoints for an existing large and complex software intensive system. This definition approach enables the customization and extension of a set of predefined viewpoints to address the requirements of a specific development organization. The application of this approach has helped us to identify a set of execution viewpoints that we are currently using to construct execution views of an MRI system, a large software-intensive system in the healthcare domain.