Evolution Styles: Multi-View/Multi-Level Model for Software Architecture Evolution

Abstract

With the ever growing complexity and size of software systems, the role and responsibilities of architect have changed extensively. Architecting has become a broad, creative activity that involves discovering stakeholder concerns, evaluating alternatives, making tradeoffs and planning the software process, rather than developing a simple artifact just for capturing information. Therefore, the architect is in greater need of models, methods, techniques and tools to assist in the planning and conduct of software architecture evolution. To this end, we propose evolution styles as a multi-view methodology for software architecture evolution modeling. The styles are focused on how to develop an evolution model that can capture the best architectural evolution knowledge and practices in a particular domain, and how to demonstrate this knowledge in multiple forms in order to cover the different stakeholders' viewpoints. To show the applicability of our approach, we have developed a prototype for a multi-view and multi-abstraction evolution styles editor.

Lightweight Software Architecture Evaluation for Industry: A Comprehensive Review

“…This study proposes a comparison framework to present and compare the analysis methods to elaborate on these fundamental criteria. It has been proposed by the combination of three software evaluation comparison frameworks [ 83 , 84 ]. In Table 3 , this comparison framework is introduced, which contains the following main components of SA evaluation methods: context, stakeholder, contents, time, and reliability.…”

Modelling and Planning Evolution Styles in Software Architecture

“…However, software architectures go hand in hand with the software products they document, they evolve together and constantly. While a lot of works have been directed towards the problem of reusing the evolution of software architectures [5][6][7][8], it is very tedious to evolve the architecture of complex systems (distributed systems, some embedded systems, etc.). The best would be to plan and predict the future evolution paths of an evolving software architecture based on data from previous changes.…”

“…So, little work has focused on the problem of planning and prediction of the future evolution of software architectures. The majority of research efforts focused on the specification, development, deployment of software architectures [9][10][11] and the analysis, design and reuse of the software architectures evolution [6,12]. However, little works, to our knowledge, are devoted to planning and prediction of futures evolutions paths in software architectures.…”