Software evolution based on software architecture

While organizations have invested millions of dollars on their software systems and it is impossible to produce systems of any size that do not need to be changed, software evolution for requirement change is getting more and more important. So far, most of the efforts on software evolution have focused on system function change or system architecture transfer. The number of evolution for core data model adding is relative few. Software architecture is a good tool for software design and software analysis, but it has limitation on software evolution when there need some architecture inheriting for core data model adding. In this paper, we proposed method using an extended software architecture model to evolve exist software with additional data models. The method is applied to evolve a visualization software platform from plane data processing ability to a visualization platform with ability of processing both plane data and volume data.