Challenges in architecture-based software evolution

More and more economic activities rely on software to achieve their business goal, becoming thus software intensive. The change in the economic environment has to be reflected at the level of the software support. Inversely, changes in the technology and software support, induce changes in the economic environment, i.e., the organisation changes in order to better take advantage of the software support. The software applications have to be able to change in order to adapt to the environment evolution (Lehman’s law)[13]. During the past years, the work on the engineering of software intensive applications considered the software architecture as a central point in the development process: the architecture is specified early in the software lifecycle, and constitutes the model that drives the entire engineering process. Thus, first considered at an abstract level, the architecture is stepwise refined till obtaining a concrete representation which sometimes can be used for automatic code generation (see figure below). Software properties can be specified and verified early in the development process, where error recovery costs are lower. A formal refinement guaranties property preservation from one step to another. Application Architecture description Architecture descriptio