This presentation was created for the SATURN conference series and does not necessarily reflect the positions and views of the Software Engineering Institute.

Architecture evolution is the process of designing an architecture to meet today’s and tomorrow’s business goals, while maximizing expected value, in the face of uncertainty. Architecture evolution therefore has two foundations: 1) architecture design, which allows us to reason about the quality attribute consequences of design decisions with respect to trajectories of evolutionary steps and 2) software engineering economics, which looks at the consequences of design decisions as investments and gives us techniques to reason about the value of such investments given future uncertainty. In this talk, I will sketch our approaches to both aspects of evolution.

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