Enabling Consistency between Software Artefacts for Software Adaption and Evolution

Abstract

Short development times of software became crucial to stay competitive. However, the quality should not suffer from the faster development processes, which is why increasingly more automation is gaining ground in this context. If models are involved in the development process and used for performance prediction, there are delays due to emerging inconsistencies between different software artifacts. The elimination of these inconsistencies is a time consuming, complex and error prone activity. Currently, there are already approaches for automated consistency preservation of software artifacts. Nevertheless, the limited scope in terms of supported change scenarios is a significant disadvantage.Therefore, we present a comprehensive approach for the maintenance of consistency between the system design and adaptive as well as evolutionary changes. In comparison to existing approaches, the consistency preservation has been significantly extended in our approach to cover a multitude of changes resulting from adaptation and evolution. Ultimately, several validation steps were integrated into the approach, enabling continuous assessment regarding the quality of the consistency preservation. In a case study based evaluation, we measured the accuracy of the updated models and associated performance predictions.