Architecture-centric development and evolution processes for component-based software

Component-based development focuses on component reuse and composition: abstract components (as wished) must be searched for and matched to existing component (as found). This search and reuse activity greatly impacts software development and evolution processes. Unfortunately, very few works propose adaptations of traditional software engineering processes and no existing ADL yet permits to describe the resulting development artifacts. This paper proposes architecture-centric processes for the development and evolution of component-based software. Architecture-centric development produces descriptions for architecture specification, architecture configuration and component assembly. The paper shows how Dedal, a three-level ADL, can be used to support the consistent description of these three artifacts. The paper then shows how these descriptions can be used during a controlled architecture-centric evolution process that helps build, test and record versions of component-based software. This tackles the well-known issues of architecture erosion and drift that denote mismatches between the different architecture definitions.