The Anatomy-An Instrument for Managing Software Evolution and Evolvability

This paper describes ongoing research concerning support for evolution and evolvability of software systems at a development unit of Ericsson AB, Sweden. At Ericsson, there is currently a shift towards shorter and swifter development projects, which requires greater attention to evolution aspects. The paper presents the concept of anatomy, which is a view of the functional evolution of a software system, and how it acts as an instrument for dealing with software evolution and evolvability. The anatomy concept brings together release planning, scoping and incremental development to form a holistic evolution view. Both a multi-release evolution and a within-release evolution are addressed. The former is shown in a product anatomy driven by strategic and business goals, whereas the latter is shown in a project anatomy which adds time and resource constraints to a subset of the product anatomy. The anatomy is argued to lead to a greater organisational focus on both evolution and evolvability, in part due to being a tool for spreading knowledge about the evolution of the system it depicts. The paper presents the so far defined anatomy infrastructure, and a desired way of working. It also points to open research issues for the continuation of the research at hand