Service-based architectures have now become commonplace, creating the need to address their systematic maintenance and evolution. We propose to enable transformation-driven evolution for service architectures in a semi-automated fashion. In contrast to the existing solutions like service wrapping, migration or run-time adaptation etc., the proposal supports primitive and customisable architectural transformations to support an incremental evolution for service architectures. An empirical approach is adopted to investigate the extent to which the architecture evolution tasks (i.e. modeling, transformation and refinement) can be automated and validated in context to the central hypothesis for architecturecentric software evolution. Based on the initial results, we plan to proceed toward modeling and automating the architectural evolution in a formal way.