Toward software architectures on demand

Summary form only given. The rapid growth of technology, coupled with the tightened development time and production cost constraints, have imposed tremendous pressure and an intense desire for software enterprises to create new and innovative designs, which could respond to rapidly changing business and operating environments. Enterprises must invest in building stable architectures, i.e. based on conceptual knowledge more than application context. Any system based on a stable architecture is built in a way that captures the enduring goals that the software is supposed to meet. We refer to these emerging trends of architectures as Architectures on Demand as they can be adaptable, customizable, extensible, personalizable, self-configurable, and self-manageable, according to the future requirements and changes in the operating environments. In nutshell, Adaptability refers to the extent software system architecture can accommodate changes in its environment, that is constrained by the hardware and software. Customizability refers to the ability of the architecture to be managed and customized by an agent, its users, and benefiting applications etc. Extensibility means that the architecture is designed to include mechanisms for expanding/enhancing the system with new capabilities, without having to make major changes to the architecture and the underlying infrastructure. A good architecture provides the design principles to ensure this-a roadmap for that portion of the road that is yet to be built. Self-configurable and self-manageable architectures refer to the architectures of systems that can mange and “self-heal” its properties dynamically at runtime at the level of components, connectors and the underlying infrastructure.