A Three-level Versioning Model for Component-based Software Architectures

Software versioning is intrinsic to software evolution. It keeps history of previous software states (versions) and updates the software to the latest stable version. In the last twenty years, a lot of work was dedicated to software versioning. Many version control mechanisms were proposed to store and track software versions for different software forms (code, objects, models, . . . ). This paper addresses in particular software architecture versioning considering three abstraction levels: specification, implementation and deployment. In previous work, we proposed an approach that generates evolution plans for three-level component-based software architectures. The generated plans deal with a change initiated from one of the three abstraction levels and propagate it to the other levels in order to keep software descriptions consistent and coherent all along the software lifecycle. On this basis, we propose a versioning model that stores information about evolution and also keeps track of the right version of architecture descriptions at a given abstraction level. Keywords–architecture evolution, abstraction levels, versioning, component reuse.

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