Architectural Maintenance Using a Data Warehouse System for Availability Analysis

This paper describes the usage of an architecture centric quality engineering approach to improve the availability of an existing system during maintenance. In most projects existing software is extended or modified to fit new or modified requirements. A crucial subset of the requirements are non-functional requirements, also known as quality attributes. Here the quality attribute availability is in the main focus. The goal of the described approach is architectural re-design to improve the availability of the system. In order to make a profound decision on architectural changes the availability as well as the architecture of the existing system was analyzed in detail. For the availability analysis runtime data of the system was collected and analyzed using a data warehouse system. The use of the re-design process for increased availability was very effective in increasing the availability of the system. The efficiency of the process still needs to be improved.