Application infrastructure evolution: An industrial case study

• Main Author: Csaky, Marcus
• Other Authors: Muller, Hausi A.
• Language: English; en
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: software evolution; application infrastructure
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1828/4551

Modern computer infrastructure continues to advance at an accelerating pace. This advancement affects all aspects of computing systems such as hardware, device types, operating systems, and software. The constant change creates a problem for software vendors who must support not only the latest systems, but also previous versions. This infrastructure updating requirement limits software vendors when implementing new software features and in turn product innovation. There is a significant and increasing cost associated with adhering to application infrastructure requirement changes. To accommodate infrastructure change requirements, immediate and measurable action must be taken. First, the current industrial software development practices and tooling need to be analyzed. Current industrial release patterns and product update tooling must be understood and their shortcomings investigated. Next, key use cases ought to be identified and new methodologies and extensions to existing frameworks ought to be proposed to circumvent these difficulties. Finally, systems must be architected and developed to test the solution hypotheses and then deployed in commercial applications. This thesis focuses on these critical steps in the call to action to change software infrastructure management. In this thesis, we analyze an industrial problem including a real case study. We illustrate the currently available approaches and then describe how they are not sufficient in solving the problem. Our approach is based on an extension of a previously developed framework (i.e., the SmartContext commerce framework). In particular, we design an architecture and implementation for our industrial problem domain. === Graduate === 0984