International audienceSoftware architectures are subject to several types of change during the software lifecycle (e.g. adding requirements, correcting bugs, enhancing performance). The variety of these changes makes architecture evolution management complex because all architecture descriptions must remain consistent after change. To do so, whatever part of the architectural description they affect, the effects of change have to be propagated to the other parts. The goal of this paper is to provide support for evolving component-based architectures at multiple abstraction levels. Architecture descriptions follow anarchitectural model named Dedal, the three description levels of which correspond to the three main development steps | specification, implementation and deployment. This paper formalizes an evolution management model that generates evolution plans according to a given architecture change request, thus preserving consistency of architecture descriptions and coherence between them. The approach is implemented as an Eclipse-based tool and validated with three evolution scenarios of a Home Automation Software example

Handling evolution in component-based software architectures is a non trivial task. Indeed, a series of changes applied on software may alter its architecture leading to several inconsistencies. In turn, architecture inconsistencies lead to software erosion and shorten its lifetime. To avoid architectural inconsistencies and increase software reliability, architecture evolution must be handled at all steps of the software lifecycle. Moreover, changes must be treated as first class entities. In this paper, we propose an evolution management model that takes these criteria into account. The model is a support for our three-level Dedal architectural model. It captures and handles change at any of the Dedal abstraction levels: specification, implementation and deployment. It generates evolution plans using evolution rules proposed in previous work. The generation process is implemented using the ProB model checker and evaluated through three evolution scenarios of a Home Automation Software.

Software architectures are the blueprint of software systems construction and evolution. During the overall software lifecycle, several changes of its architecture may be considered (e.g. including new software requirements, correcting bugs, enhancing software performance). To ensure a valid and reliable evolution, software architecture changes must be captured, verified and validated at an early stage of the software evolution process. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a set of evolution rules for software architectures in a manner that preserves consistency and coherence between abstraction levels. The rules are specified in the B formal language and applied to a three-level Adl that covers the three steps of software development: specification, implementation and deployment. To validate our rules, the approach is tested on a running example of Home Automation Software.