Analysis of SW architectures in High- and Low-volume electronic systems.
Henk Obbink
Maarten Pennings
Wim Christis
Rob van Ommering
Jodie Ledeboer
Wim Stut
Juergen Mueller
The products of Philips Electronics can be roughly divided into two main segments. The first segment is called low volume electronics and is covered by the professional business groups of IE, PMS and BE. The second segment is called high volume electronics and is addressed by the consumer business groups of CE, PS and DAP. Increasingly these electronic systems are becoming software intensive. We will not explain the reasons for this software increase, because that has been adequately dealt with elsewhere. The required measures, however, that must be undertaken by a company to cope with this shift in paradigm from pure electronic systems, towards software intensive systems, are twofold. The first measure deals with the software process improvement issues. The second measure covers the mastering and improvement of the software architecture. In the past few years a lot of attention has been given to improve the software process, through the so called SPI activities. On the SW architecture side of the story
A short explanation of the Soni architectural framework will be given. The framework identifies four main structures in software architecture: Conceptual architecture, Module architecture, Code architecture and Execution architecture. This framework has been applied to Audio systems, TV systems, VOD systems, X-RAY viewing systems and MR systems. The results of these studies will be presented and a comparison will be given. Furthermore the applicability of such framework will be discussed and necessary modifications indicated. The paper reports about work in progress. The preliminary results and conclusions are, however, promising and challenging. The similarities and differences among the various systems are surprising. The work has resulted in a much better understanding of the software architectures of the systems studied. In the past architectures where either implicit and only known by the experts. By modelling them from various viewpoints it has become easier to share the architecture with the no
Introduction
Problem Statement
Overview of Architectural Analysis Model
Architectural analysis examples
– XRAY
– MR
– VOD
– Audio
– TV
– VCR (optional)
Discussion of results
Conclusions and Recommendations