Software Architecture Evolution

Software architectures must frequently evolve to cope with changing requirements, and this evolution often implies integrating new concerns. Unfortunately, when the new concerns are crosscutting, existing architecture description languages provide little or no support for this kind of evolution. The software architect must modify multiple elements of the architecture manually, which risks introducing inconsistencies. This chapter provides an overview, comparison and detailed treatment of the various state-of-the-art approaches to describing and evolving software architectures. Furthermore, we discuss one particular framework named Tran SAT, which addresses the above problems of software architecture evolution. Tran SAT provides a new element in the software architecture descriptions language, called an architectural aspect, for describing new concerns and their integration into an existing architecture. Following the early aspect paradigm, Tran SAT allows the software architect to design a software architecture stepwise in terms of aspects at the design stage. It realises the evolution as the weaving of new architectural aspects into an existing software architecture.