Substitutability-Based Version Propagation to Manage the Evolution of Three-Level Component-Based Architectures

Abstract : An important issue of software architecture evolution is the capability for architects to keep a trace of the evolution of their work. This paper states that existing research on versioning does not cope well with software architectures. Indeed, it does not propose any adapted solutions to manage the co-evolution of the different architecture representations produced during the development process. We base our work on a three-level architecture description language (ADL) named Dedal, which represents architectures at three abstraction levels. Moreover, Dedal provides a formal base for managing version propagation. It is based on component substitutability that generalizes Liskov's substitutability principle. We propose a set of rules to support the prediction of version compatibility in terms of impact on the different architecture levels.