Coordination technologies for managing information system evolution

Information System Engineering has become under increasing pressure to come up with software solutions that endow systems with the agility that is required to evolve in a continually changing business and technological environment. In this paper, we suggest that Software Engineering has a contribution to make in terms of concepts and techniques that have been recently developed for Parallel Program Design and Software Architectures, which we have named Coordination Technologies. We show how such mechanisms can be encapsulated in a new modelling primitive – coordination contract – that can be used for extending Component Based Development approaches in order to manage such levels of change.