Architecture-centric maintenance for embedded systems

Software maintenance is one of the most time-consuming and effort-intensive activities in the lifecycle of a software system. Due to its nature, it increasingly ties development resources and, hence, prevents bringing innovation to the products due to tight budget constraints. In ArQuE - a German research project - we developed an architecture-centric approach for introducing innovations goal-oriented and efficiently. In this experience paper, we present our lessons learned in applying the approach to industrial systems in the embedded systems domain. In particular, we discuss the critical success factors, which make the approach work or fail, and how the efficient operationalization of reverse engineering technology revealed necessary insight for the introduction of innovation.