Formal architecture modeling of business application- software maintenance case study

Maintenance of complex business applications is challenging for software services industry. The maintenance team inherits the software with little design and implementation knowledge. The client-facing team gathers an ad-hoc architectural description of some sort and communicates the same to the geographically distributed maintenance team through informal box and line diagrams. This information is poorly understood, and the underlying architectural constraints are never enforced. This paper proposes a type system to model the architecture of a complex enterprise IT system using Acme architecture description language and reports a modeling approach to capture various architectural design decisions architects perform as a part of the architecture review. An initial field-study to evaluate the usefulness of such modeling has been encouraging.