Alistair Cockburn

The executives and sales reps faced an unpleasant task with regard to their flagship product: explaining to their installed customers that they would need to replace their workstations with more powerful ones just in order to install the forthcoming upgrade to the software. The cost of installing the new version of the product endangered the company's very existence. That the company, Mentor Graphics, survived the damage is a story unto itself, but it is not the story of this article. This article is about strategies for evolving software architectures in tandem with business revenue.