Our References in Architecture-Centric Engineering

Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE

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Reference Projects

One of the primary goals of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is the long-term entrenchment of scientific research results in industrial application.

  • John Deere

    John Deere is one of the leading manufacturers in the world for agricultural, forestry, and construction machinery. Together with John Deere engineers we analyzed the software architectures of modern display systems, making it possible to derive improvement measures based upon which both the complexity and the diversity of product variants can be managed.

  • Tekla

    Tekla is a Finnish company that develops software products for the engineering and construction markets. Tekla Structures is one of Tekla’s key products. Tekla is continually improving their software in terms of new features and invests in high quality. As part of this strategy, Tekla performed an architecture evaluation together with Fraunhofer IESE, which now allows them to expend effort in a very focused manner. Based on the evaluation results, Tekla’s architecture competencies were further improved with tutorials and hands-on training on recent products. Recurring architecture evaluations assure sustainable success of the improvements.

  • Wikon GmbH

    Wikon GmbH is a manufacturer of remote control systems (hardware and software). One of their main applications are battery-powered remote control systems for the energy sector. We iteratively introduced architecture-centric development at Wikon GmbH. The results show that investments into reuse and architecting are worthwhile, even for small development organizations.

  • Lufthansa AG

    We supported our customer Lufthansa AG in selecting a new technology for one of their operative systems based on our competence in architecture-centric engineering.

Overview of Architecture Projects

In recent years, IESE has conducted more than 50 architecture  projects with customers from industry in the areas of embedded systems and information systems.

The motivations of our customers were quite diverse, but the projects can be classified according to their criticality for the customer:

Projects with a focus on evaluation activities

  • Risk management: Situation is under control, but risks should be identified.
  • Emergency: Situation is not under control anymore. Reasons and countermeasures have to be identified.
  • Clash: Situation between different organizations is critical with regard to a product (e.g., customer / supplier relationship for a software system). Reasons and countermeasures have to be identified.

Projects with a focus on constructive activities

  • Quality management: Long-term quality improvement for systems that are still in good shape.
  • Evolution or revolution: Long-term quality improvement for systems that are already in a critical state.

We have conducted all these projects using our architecture services  and following our philosophy of architecting.

Empirical Results

Relevance

• In more than 40 cases, an architecture evaluation done by IESE allowed identifying and rating risks early. Based on the results, business-critical decisions were facilitated.

• More than 90% of the recommendations resulting from an architecture evaluation were accepted by a customer and their realization was ordered within two weeks.

• In more than 80% of the cases, no up-to-date or sufficient architecture documentation exists, which could serve as a basis for making critical decisions. The architecture reconstruction offered by IESE supports goal-oriented and efficient reconstruction in order to achieve a sound basis for decision making.

• In architecture coaching with customers we could observe that during architecture construction, far more than 50% of the architects’ time had to be spent on requirements clarification, reconstruction of existing system ideas, and on other communication and organization tasks.

Performance & Effectiveness

• With Fraunhofer SAVE, many systems with several million lines of code were checked for compliance to the intended architecture. In particular systems, more than 50,000 violations of the architecture were discovered and recommendations for improvement were derived.

• Optimization of the visualization of software architectures in Fraunhofer SAVE allowed reducing the processing time of analysis tasks by more than 60%.

• A recurring check of the architecture compliance of a product family’s implementation with Fraunhofer SAVE allowed increasing conformance sustainably up to 98%.

• Developers getting real-time feedback about architecture violations through SAVE LiFE cause up to 60% less architecture compliance violations.

• With goal-oriented analysis and consequent re-design of the architecture, the response time of user interactions in an architecture visualization tool was reduced by a factor of more than 10 for very large systems being visualized.

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