Continuous Delivery (CD) aims at reducing the cycle time from changes to software release while also increasing the software quality. To automate CD, delivery process models, defining all delivery activities need to be designed. Quality properties of delivery process models, such as maintainability, still oppose challenges. Previous research indicates that the quality of such models can be improved by aligning them with the software architecture. While software architecture knowledge is only incorporated implicitly, deep technical and process knowledge is required. On this basis, this paper introduces a new kind of delivery process models that focus mainly on software architecture knowledge. Hereby, we discard the current activity-centric view and shift to an artifact-centric view. Moreover, we outsource the required process- and technical knowledge to a transformation activities knowledge base. In order to make an artifact-based delivery process model executable, we provide a model-to-model transformation which constructs a CD pipeline from an artifact-based model with the help of the transformation activities knowledge base. We evaluated our approach by conducting a small industrial qualitative user study. It showed that low-experienced developers benefit from the reduced knowledge requirements of the artifact-based modeling approach.

Abstract The discipline of enterprise architecture (EA) is an established approach to model and manage the interaction of business processes and IT in an organization. Thereby, the EA model as a central artifact of EA is subject to a continuous evolution caused by multiple sources of changes. The continuous evolution requires a lot of effort in controlling and managing the evolution of the EA model. This is especially true when merging the induced changes from different sources in the EA model. Additionally, the lack of tool and automation support makes this a very time-consuming and error-prone task. The evolutionary character and the automated quality assessment of artifacts is a well-known challenge in the software development domain as well. To meet these challenges, the discipline of continuous delivery (CD) has emerged to be very useful. The evolution of EA model artifacts shows similarities to the evolution of software artifacts. Therefore, we leveraged practices of CD to practices of EA maintenance. Thus, we created a conceptual framework for automated EA model maintenance. The concepts were realized in a first prototype and were evaluated in a fictitious case study against equivalence classes based on EA model metrics and a set of several requirements for automated EA model maintenance from research. Overall, the concepts prove to be a promising basis for further refinement, implementation, and evaluation in research in an industrial context.

In our former work we proposed a micro service-based reference architecture for Enterprise Measurement Infrastructures (EMI) which received encouraging feedback. The reference architecture supports the systematic development of measurement systems. This paper provides deeper insight into the application of the reference architecture by presenting the results of two field studies after an examination of the most important requirements that drove the development of the reference architecture. The two selected field studies were conducted with large cooperation partners from industry and research and addressed real problems. Using our reference architecture, development process, and requirements gathering techniques we were able to successfully build the EMIs presented in this paper. These results further ease the application of micro service inside our reference architecture and support practitioners with specific examples.

Large scale measurement systems are hard to build and to maintain. In this paper we propose an architecture blueprint for a federalist Enterprise Measurement Infrastructure (EMI) which helps to address these typical weaknesses of centralistic measurement systems. The EMI is based on the ideas of Service Oriented Measurements. We combined these with modern ideas from the area of Enterprise Application Integration and extended the ISO 15939 data flow to allow a more flexible and elegant solution. The current prototypes of EMI implementations and field studies prove the benefits of the architecture blueprint over existing solutions. We strongly belief that the EMI can help to build better, extendible, and maintainable measurement systems which are integrated and aligned with modern business needs.