Track: Large and Legacy / Time: Monday 11:30 - 12:20 / Location: Store Sal, BORA BORA

Large scale software systems and products are usually developed in a step-wise approach--especially if they have ambitious requirements and a long lifetime. The initial release intentionaly focuses on specific market segments, essential functionality, or provides only restricted non-functional capabilities, for example, capacity and performance. Subsequent releases then extend and enhance both features and capablities to meet the systems's full set of requirements. However, new releases should neither break existing functionality, nor should they require fundamental changes of the system's base-line architecture. Especially the latter is challenging if a new release requires substantial enhancements of non-functional qualities, since they tend to have a significant impact on a system's concrete design and use of technology.

In this talk we demonstrate from both a process and a technical perspective the challenges of evolving a large automation platform based on .net towards extended capacity, scalability, and performance, as well as lo lower footprint. How to approach, schedule and perform the evolution under given time and resource constraints? How to limit the effect of platform changes to the to applications using it? What are the technical measures to actually meet the required enhancements, and how were they realized? And how to deal with the constraints and limitations of the underlying .net platform? The lessons learned from this talk help you in understanding the challenges of evolving large scale systems in general, and enable you to take the appropriate process and technical approaches in evolving your own systems.

Keywords: software evolution, capacity, footprint, .net, C#, C++
Audience: Architects, Senior Programmers