Evolution Styles: Multi-View/Multi-Level Model for Software Architecture Evolution
Adel Hassan, Mourad Chabane Oussalah · Journal of Software · 2018
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.