Tracing Evolution Changes of Software Artifacts

Abstract

Software evolution encompasses all activities related to engineering software, from its inception to retirement. Propagating change across software models that are al- tered due to maintenance activities is a first step towards maintaining consistency between architectural, design, and implementation models. Model synchronization techniques initially presented within the context ofModelDriven Archi- tecture provide an instrument for achieving change trace- ability and consistency. In this paper, we present a frame- work whereby software artifacts at different levels of ab- straction such as architecture diagrams, object models, and abstract syntax trees are represented by graph-basedMOF compliant models that can be synchronized using model transformations. In such a framework model dependencies are implicitly encoded using transformation rules and an equivalence relation is used to evaluate when two models become synchronized.