Mae---a system model and environment for managing architectural evolution

Abstract

As with any other artifact produced as part of the software life cycle, software architectures evolve and this evolution must be managed. One approach to doing so would be to apply any of a host of existing configuration management systems, which have long been used successfully at the level of source code. Unfortunately, such an approach leads to many problems that prevent effective management of architectural evolution. To overcome these problems, we have developed an alternative approach centered on the use of an integrated architectural and configuration management system model. Because the system model combines architectural and configuration management concepts in a single representation, it has the distinct benefit that all architectural changes can be precisely captured and clearly related to each other-both at the fine-grained level of individual architectural elements and at the coarse-grained level of architectural configurations. To support the use of the system model, we have developed Mae, an architectural evolution environment through which users can specify architectures in a traditional manner, manage the evolution of the architectures • 241 using a check-out/check-in mechanism that tracks all changes, select a specific architectural configuration, and analyze the consistency of a selected configuration. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach by showing how the system model and its accompanying environment were used in the context of several representative projects.

On-Demand Quality-Oriented Assistance in Component-Based Software Evolution

“…We are also studying the feasibility of integrating the tool in a Configuration Management System. We limit our study to CMS dedicated to software architectures, like Mae [18]. Thus we take advantage from the enhanced control version capabilities of these systems.…”

Differencing and merging of architectural views

“…For maximum generality, we assume a disconnected and stateless operation, i.e., no monitoring of structural changes is taking place while the user is modifying a given view (e.g., Mae [RHM+04]) and no trace is kept of the set of changes made to a view (e.g., [Jim05]). …”

“…Many of these techniques are also limited in their ability to detect differences based purely on structural information; they assume that elements have unique identifiers (every time an element is changed, even when only its type changes, it gets a new unique identifier [AP03][OWK03]), or only match two elements if both their labels and their types match [CCG+03]. Other approaches (e.g., Mae [RHM+04]) rely on the environment tracking all changes using fine-grained element-level versioning. Although such environments may provide the ability to infer high-level operations such as merges, splits or clones, in addition to the low-level operations such as inserts and deletes, they require a heavy upfront investment in tool building and integration, and have not become widely adopted.…”

Towards a Dynamic Model for Requirements Handling in Software Architecture Configuration Management

“…This approach takes advantage of run-time models and model-driven engineering techniques to adapt. A model for reconfiguration coordination patterns was introduced in [9]. This approach shows how reconfiguration management patterns are stated by combination of elementary transformations in model.…”

“…The model introduced in [8] is based on a collection of primitives to reconfig ure the connector as well as a language to specify the interfaces and reconfigure them. A system model for managing the evolution of software architecture, called Mae, was introduced in [9] in which users specify architectures in a traditional way. Also this model com-bines concepts of configuration management with tech-niques of software architecture field.…”