Future-Proof Software-Systems (PDF)

Software is a crucial success factor for most of today's products and services. The tremendous impact of software on all areas of our jobs, lives, the environment and on society is undisputed and is growing every day.

The software community has a responsibility to produce and operate useful, dependable, and trustworthy software. The software should at the same time provide business value and guarantee a number of quality of service properties, such as security, safety, performance, integrity, etc.

The lion's share of current software investment is not for greenfield creation, but for the extension and evolution of existing software-systems. These systems are often very large, mission-critical, and long-lived. They need to be sustainable, both commercially and qualitatively. We call these "future-proof software-systems."

Experience has shown that a first-rate architecture is the foundation of future-proof software-systems. Therefore, the focus of this book is on architecture and architecture's value for long-lived, mission-critical, trustworthy systems.

This objective is achieved by using:

. The powerful evolution strategy "Managed Evolution";

. The engineering best practice "Principle-Based Architecting".

This book does not represent a new development methodology but instead provides a set of good engineering practices that can be integrated into most development processes for the development of future-proof software-systems.

Frank J. Furrer graduated as an electrical engineer at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zürich, Switzerland and earned his Ph.D. from the same institution. Afterward, he was active in the industry as an entrepreneur, as an architect, and as a management consultant for Information Technology and IT Systems Architectures. Since 2013, he teaches as an honorary professor at the Technische Universität Dresden, Germany (Faculty for Computer Science). This book represents the distilled outcomes of his long professional career as a software-systems architect, consultant, author, and educator.