System Evolution through Design Information Evolution: a Case Study

This paper describes how design information, in our case UML specifications, can be used to evolve a software system and validate the consistency of such an evolution. This work complements our previous work on reflective architectures for software evolution describing the role played by meta-data in the evolution of software systems. The whole paper focuses on a case study; we show how the urban traffic control system (UTCS) or part of it must evolve when unscheduled road maintenance, a car crush or a traffic jam block normal vehicular flow in a specific road. The UTCS case study perfectly shows how requirements can dynamically change and how the design of the system should adapt to such changes. Both system consistency and adaptation are governed by rules based on meta-data representing the system design information. As we show by an example, such rules represent the core of our evolutionary approach driving the evolutionary and consistency checker meta-objects and interfacing the m...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: IASSE
• Authors: Walter Cazzola, Ahmed Ghoneim, Gunter Saake
• Keywords: Case Study, Consistency, IASSE 2004, Software Engineering, Software Systems