On Design Methodology for Flexible Systems

Abstract: In software architecture, two seemingly contradicting goals are to be considered when designing systems, namely maintainability and performance aspects. It seems to be commonly accepted that systems can be designed either for flexibility and thus easily be maintained, or for performance, but generally not both at the same time. In this thesis we dexcribe blexibility and resulting maintainabiltiy from different aspects and show how it can eventually be achieved togehter with acceptable performance.