Towards Software Architecture Physiology: Identifying Vital Components

Several architecture analysis methods are proposed in the literature for evaluating both the structure and the behavior of architectures. A parallel between humans and software systems leads to some interesting consideration on kinds of analysis that can be performed on a system architecture, such as the identification of vital element. Such identification improves the system architecture understanding and allows us to estimate to what extent, a change on some components could impact the rest of the architecture.