Architectural software patterns and maintainability: A case study

The importance of building maintainable software is being recognized in the community of software development. By developing software that is easy to maintain, the time and resources needed to perform the modifications may be decreased. This will in turn mean economical savings and increased profits. Architectural software patterns are said to promote the development of maintainable software. The aim of this project was therefore to investigate whether architectural software patterns possess this property or not. A case study was performed where two candidate architectures were compared using a method called Architectural analysis of modifiability. This method uses change scenarios and modification ratios to identify differences between candidate architectures. A system developed at Ericsson Microwave Systems AB was used for the case study. One of the candidate architectures consisted of two architectural software patterns: the Layers pattern and the Model-View-Controller pattern. The architecture analysis showed that the Layers pattern did promote maintainability whereas the Model-View-Controller pattern did not, from the basis of judgement associated with the method