“Make or buy” of software has been a key question for management since the emergence of computerized information systems. Until today this question has not been answered satisfactorily. It is still unclear what evaluation methods should be used to support the decision process in the selection of a suitable package unambiguously. In this article a first step in the development of a framework for...

This article describes the Bauhaus tool suite as a concrete example for software visualization in reverse engineering, re-engineering, and software maintenance. Results from a recent survey on software visualization in these domains are reported. According to this survey, Bauhaus can indeed be considered a typical representative of these domains regarding the way software artifacts are visualiz...

Software maintenance teams are often faced with the challenge of adapting a system’s architecture in response to problem reports as well as new functional requirements. More often than not, these maintenance objectives can be accomplished either through the addition of alternative, “patching” components, or by refactoring the original architecture. The latter approach usually results in a simpl...

In a modern approach to software design, development and maintenance, new models of application building are required, which replace the traditional phase-refinement, waterfall model with the notion of software evolution [1]. In fact, software systems are in practice always built incrementally, and requirement analysis continues, de facto, also during the development process (requirement adjust...