A Specification and Detection Approach for Parallel Evolution Conflicts of Software Architectures

Abstract

Software evolution has been a necessary part of the software development, while software architecture evolution is an important issue of software evolution. Software architecture evolution is generally realized through some evolution operations such as adding components or connectors, removing components or connectors. However, when some evolution operations are applied to the same software architecture in parallel, they sometimes make conflicting modifications, which will hinder the correctness of software architecture evolution. Although different approaches have been proposed to describe and analyze software architecture evolution, little work has been made to address evolution conflicts of software architectures. Focusing on parallel evolution conflicts of software architectures, firstly the paper establishes definitions and characterizations of parallel evolution conflicts of software architectures based on hypergraph morphisms and set theories, and describes parallel evolution conflicts of software architectures through these definitions and characterizations. Secondly the paper constructs the critical pair definition of parallel evolution conflicts of software architectures based on hypergraphs and hypergraph morphisms, analyzes the completeness of the critical pair, designs and optimizes an algorithm to detect efficiently parallel evolution conflicts of software architectures using the critical pair. Finally, a tool support is used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method.