Tackling rapid technology changes by applying enterprise engineering theories

Abstract

• Applied enterprise engineering theories help to build evolvable software. • The notion of affordance can help to separate function from construction of a software system. • Combinatorial effects reduced when building system using the Affordance-Driven Assembling. Moore's law states that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years. A similar force appears to drive the progress of information technology (IT). IT companies tend to struggle to keep up with the latest technological developments, and software solutions are becoming increasingly outdated. The ability for software to change easily is defined as evolvability. One of the major fields researching evolvability is enterprise engineering (EE). The EE research paradigm applies theories from other fields to the evolvability of organisations. We argue that such theories can be applied to software engineering (SE) as well, which can contribute to the construction of software with a clear separation of dynamically changing technologies based on a relatively stable description of functions required for a specific user. EE theories introduce notions of function, construction, and affordance. We reify these concepts in terms of SE. Based on this reification, we propose affordance-driven assembling (ADA) as a software design approach that can aid in the construction of more evolvable software solutions. We exemplify the implementation of ADA in a case study on a commercial system and measure its effectiveness in terms of the impact of changes, as defined by the normalised systems theory.