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Evolution styles: foundations and models for software architecture evolution

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Abstract

As new market opportunities, technologies, platforms, and frameworks become available, systems require large-scale and systematic architectural restructuring to accommodate them. Today’s architects have few techniques to help them plan this architecture evolution. In particular, they have little assistance in planning alternative evolution paths, trading off various aspects of the different paths, or knowing best practices for particular domains. In this paper, we describe an approach for planning and reasoning about architecture evolution. Our approach focuses on providing architects with the means to model prospective evolution paths and supporting analysis to select among these candidate paths. To demonstrate the usefulness of our approach, we show how it can be applied to an actual architecture evolution. In addition, we present some theoretical results about our evolution path constraint specification language.

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Notes

  1. In Sect. 3.2, we mentioned that architectural styles can be captured by means of UML profiles. In this case, these architectural-style profiles should extend the profile of Fig. 2. Incidentally, UML profiles could be used much more extensively than the way we present here. We could use them to define a much more elaborate base style that serves as a specialization of UML to formal software architecture modeling. That is, we could define a general profile for representing software architectures (or perhaps several profiles for different architectural views). However, the problem of defining a UML profile for software architecture is not particularly relevant to the topic at hand, is not necessary for the case study we present in Sect. 5, and has already been explored in previous work, so we do not do so here.

  2. This is “weak next,” meaning that \(\mathord {\bigcirc }\phi \) is interpreted to be true in the final state of a sequence. “Strong next” can be defined in terms of the weak next operator: \(\bar{\bigcirc }\phi := \lnot \mathord {\bigcirc }\lnot \phi \).

  3. In the program verification community, the problem of checking a finite, single trace is known as runtime verification, with the term model checking reserved for checking entire state structures [6].

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the Software Engineering Institute, IBM, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for providing support for this work. We would especially like to thank Ipek Ozkaya, Sridhar Iyengar, S Sivakumar, and Brian Giovannoni. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions, which improved the manuscript greatly.

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  1. Institute for Software Research, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Jeffrey M. Barnes, David Garlan & Bradley Schmerl

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  1. Jeffrey M. Barnes
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  2. David Garlan
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Correspondence to Jeffrey M. Barnes.

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Communicated by Dr. D. Tamzalit, B. Schätz, D. Deridder and A. Pierantonio.

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Barnes, J.M., Garlan, D. & Schmerl, B. Evolution styles: foundations and models for software architecture evolution. Softw Syst Model 13, 649–678 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-012-0301-9

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