SEA: An UML Profile for Software Evolution Analysis in Design Phase

Abstract

Software evolution is one of the software process activities that occupies a major percentage of software development cost. Since requirements change continually and new technologies emerge, software should be adapted to satisfy these new changes to continue to survive. Despite software evolution being performed after software validation and deployment, software developers should predict at earlier stages how software would evolve in the future to avoid surprises. Although many works focus on how to enhance the program structure to facilitate maintenance tasks, only few works treat software evolution in earlier phases of software development process. In this direction, we propose an UML profile that permits to tackle software maintenance issues at the early phases of software development process. The proposed approach helps software developers to predict in design phase the kind of maintenance tasks that could occur in the future.