Taming architectural evolution

Abstract

In the world of software development everything evolves. So, then, do software architectures. Unlike source code, for which the use of a configuration management (CM) system is the predominant approach to capturing and managing evolution, approaches to capturing and managing architectural evolution span a wide range of disconnected alternatives. This paper contributes a novel architecture evolution environment, called Mae, which brings together a number of these alternatives. The environment facilitates an incremental design process in which all changes to all architectural elements are integrally captured and related. Key to the environment is a rich system model that combines architectural concepts with those from the field of CM. Not only does this system model form the basis for Mae, but in precisely capturing architectural evolution it also facilitates automated support for several innovative capabilities that rely on the integrated nature of the system model. This paper introduces three of those: the provision of design guidance at the architectural level, the use of specialized software connectors to ensure run-time reliability during component upgrades, and the creation of component-level patches to be applied to deployed system configurations.

Model-to-Code Transformation from Product-Line Architecture Models to AspectJ

“…The Koala Component Model [18] is also based on the compositionality mechanism through hierarchical specification of subcomponents; then selection between subcomponent variants is realized by variation points called switches. The frameworks Mae and Dradel [5], [19] propose variant components, variant connectors, and multiversioning connectors.…”

Architecture Assessment Model for System Evolution

“…Similarly we computed the Architectural Component Attribute Divergence for the 3 attributes managed by the component using formulae (9) and (10) and it worked out to 0.25. Since Behavioral information was not available for this architecture, we could not compute the Behavioral Divergences.…”

Towards Intelligent Support for Managing Evolution of Configurable Software Product Families

“…The tool Menage can be used to graphically specify software architectures. The work of Menage has been continued in Mae [20], which added an environment for architecture based analysis and development. Their works bridges the gap between the areas of software architecture and configuration management by introducing a system model combining architectural and configuration management concepts in a way which is similar to the model presented here, with the exception that our model does not include concepts for modelling connections of components types.…”