A software lifecycle process to support consistent evolutions

Abstract

Ubiquitous software systems evolve their behavior at run-time because of uncertain environmental conditions and changing user needs. This paper describes our approach for a model-centric software evolution process of context-aware adaptive systems. Systems are represented following the feature engineering perspective and this modeling supports foreseen and unforeseen evolution. The first one deals with foreseen contexts while unforeseen evolutions address new user needs arising at run-time possibly in response to unforeseen context changes. The main contribution of this paper is a generic software lifecycle process for context-aware adaptive systems that allows systems to be managed both at design time and at execution time by exploiting suitable models. The approach supports both static and dynamic decision-making mechanisms to enact evolutions and to check the evolution consistency. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.