Towards an Automation of Software Evolution Good Practices

It is well known that software evolution is an inescapable activity in the software lifecycle. In order to prevent the negative effects of this activity (decreased quality, increased complexity, etc.), some good practices have been recommended in the past. In this paper, we present a method which aims at automating a kind of assistance to software evolution. This assistance makes it possible to guide the developer when applying changes on a given software by making persistent some good practices, which can be considered as some kind of knowledge in the software engineering practice. In this method, a domain metamodel is firstly introduced. A set of constraints formalizing the good practices are then associated to this metamodel. Together, these two elements compose the basis upon which the automatic support for the evolution assistance has been built.