Comparing the Maintainability of Two Alternative Architectures of a Postal System: SOA vs. Non-SOA

Recently, we were prompted by a local company to improve the maintainability of a postal legacy system and reduce the time to close the change requests. In this paper, we describe the first step of our on-going project that consists in the comparison of two alternative architectures of the target postal system using the Software Architecture Analysis Method (SAAM). The first is the architecture currently used in the postal system while the second one is a new architecture based on SOA. Preliminary results are in favour of the new architecture that can be adapted to change faster than the actual one. The main lesson that we have learnt in this project is that SAAM is a methodology simple to apply and useful for comparison purposes but the effective final result remains somewhat subjective.