The latest issue of the magazine “IEEE Software” features our article on architecture sustainability: “At ABB, we’re measuring and tracking the architecture sustainability of a large-scale, distributed industrial control system currently under development that’s based on Microsoft technologies and includes a layered architecture. A former version of the system grew to several million LOC and suffered from architecture erosion and high maintenance costs. We adopted a multiperspective approach called Morphosis to avoid such a situation from occurring again. Morphosis focuses on requirements, architecture design, and source code. It includes evolution scenario analysis, scoring of technology choices, architecture compliance checks, and tracking of architecture-level code metrics. This article reports our experiences with tracking selected sustainability measurements over the course of two years.”

We got a paper accepted at the Industry Track of the 17th International Software Product Line Conference (SPLC2013) to be held August 26th-30th in Tokyo, Japan: In the paper, we describe how we applied existing domain analysis approaches for software product line engineering and tailored them to include a feature analysis as well as architecture evaluation. We report our experiences from applying the approach in two subdomains of industrial automation.

Architecture maps reconstructed from several industrial software systems during a domain analysis.

The latest issue of ABB’s corporate technical journal “ABB Review” features the theme “Software”. With around 3,000 software developers in 40 countries worldwide and impacting about one quarter of ABB’s revenue, there is no doubt that ABB is a major software company. The theme issue provides an overview on some of ABB’s latest activites for embedded, system, and enterprise software as well as software processes. Check out how we prepare our controllers for the multi-core challenge and how we use performance modelling to plan the capacity and software architectures of our back-end IT.

Because much of the software was, until recently, embedded in other products, ABB was not recognized as being an obvious software company. This changed with the acquisition of enterprise software companies such as Ventyx and Mincom, rendering ABB much more visible on the software scene.

A new paper was accepted for a working session at WICSA 2012 in Helsinki: “Managing the cost-effective evolution of industrial software systems is a challenging task because of their complexity and long lifetimes. We have applied several recent sustainability evaluation and improvement approaches to the software architecture of a large industrial software system from ABB. We combined our selection of approaches in a lightweight method called MORPHOSIS“.

The MORPHOSIS Method