Object-oriented architectural evolution

Abstract

Architecture represents the most fundamental set of design decisions about a system, and evolution aspects have to be considered at this level. Also, assuming that a deliberate “architecting” step has been taken, architecture is the stage where the input from requirements is most evident and can be inspected from an evolvability point of view. Moreover, the ever-changing world makes evolvability a strong quality requirement for a software architecture. More generally, software evolution and its management have been attracting considerable interest in recent years in component-based systems, as well in object-oriented legacy systems that need to be transformed into full-fledged frameworks. The first workshop on object-oriented architecture focussed on how to capture and assess architectural quality of object-oriented software. The second workshop was organized around three main aspects to support evolution: concepts; methods; techniques; and evaluation. This third edition addresses more specific topics that resulted from the previous editions: descriptions of types of architectural evolution, levels of representation to detect architecture changes, and the role of domain and requirements analysis in software and systems architecting.