Pattern-driven reuse in architecture-centric evolution for service software

Abstract

Service-based architectures implement business processes as technical software services to develop enterprise software. As a consequence of frequent business and technical change cycles, the architect requires a reusecentered approach to systematically accommodate recurring changes in existing software. Our ‘Pat-Evol’ project aims at supporting pattern-driven reuse in architecture-centric evolution for service software. We propose architecture change mining as a complementary phase to a systematic architecture change execution. Therefore, we investigate the ‘history’ of sequential changes - exploiting change logs - to discover patterns of change that occur during evolution. To foster reuse, a pattern catalogue maintains an updated collection with once-off specification for identified pattern instances. This allows us to exploit change pattern as a generic, first class abstractions (that can be operationalised and parameterised) to support reuse in architecture-centric software evolution. The notion of ‘build-once, use-often’ empowers the role of an architect to model and execute generic and potentially reusable solution to recurring architecture evolution problems.