Aside of day-to-day business in some organizations Enterprise Architecture (EA) seems to be successful while it is not in others that also have notations, models, methods, and even dedicated EA tools. In order to understand these differences we have analyzed the development of EA in six companies over the last eight years. Our analyses showed, that apart from formal structure and processes (i) ...

Early phase design phases of more and more complex systems enhance the need for a more interdependent decision-making process across design disciplines and processes. No clear system architecture design process in industry identifies support tools for system architects' need. In this paper, we conducted interviews and workshop with system architects in a major aerospace company in order to unde...

Customisation is one of the most important topics in architecture, as architects generally work on individual prototypes instead of mass-produced designs. By using customised design and fabrication tools, architects are able to individually respond to challenges, instead of relying on universal software tools. This paper proposes new software components for interfacing industrial robots with ph...

Architecture evolution is a key feature of most software systems. There are few tools that help architects plan and execute these evolutionary paths. We demonstrate a tool to enable architects to describe evolution paths, associate properties with elements of the paths, and perform tradeoff analysis over these paths.

This article presents the outcome of an experimental process with the students of a Landscape Architecture university. We propose a multimedia geotagging system to help landscape architects during the analysis stage of a Landscape Architecture project. Our solution is specifically adapted to landscape architects requirements. Multimedia; geotagging; GIS; landscape visualization; Internet servic...

To design energy efficient buildings, architects need new tools that help them consider environmental issues such as sun lighting. To understand the implication of the direct sunlight on a project’s geometry over time, architects make simulations at different times and at different points of view. After that, they estimate the inbetween values. These simulations are virtual or physical model ba...

Software architects plan, model, and analyze the high-level design of software systems. Today, these systems are often deployed in cloud computing environments as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. The scalability of these applications is crucially impacted by architects’ early design decisions. Architects decide based on their experience and known architectural styles like a 3-tier arc...

Architectural creations occur throughout the animal kingdom, with invertebrates and vertebrates building structures such as homes to maximize their Darwinian fitness. Animal architects face many trade-offs in building optimally designed structures. But what about animals that do not build, and those that only remodel the original creations of others: do such secondary architects face similar tr...

To answer this question section 2 motivates testing by providing a multidimensional view on what testing really is. Then in section 3 practices in testing regarding software architecture are presented which require active involvement and contributions by software architects. This results not only in better quality but also speeds up development by facilitating change and decreasing maintenance ...