LGI2P / Ecole des Mines d’Alès

Complex and long-lived software need to be upgraded at runtime. Replacing a software component with a newer version is the basic evolution operation that has to be sup-ported. It is error-prone as it is difficult to guarantee the preservation of functionalities and quality. Few existing work on ADLs fully support a component replacement pro-cess from its description to its test and validation. The main idea of this work is to have software architecture evolution dynamically driven by connectors (the software glue be-tween components). It proposes a connector model which autonomically handle the reconfiguration of connections in architectures in order to support the versioning of compo-nents in a gradual, transparent and testable manner. Hence, the system has the choice to commit the evolution after a successful test phase of the software or rollback to the pre-vious state.