Integration of Existing Software Artifacts into a View- and Change-Driven Development Approach

Abstract

For the description of complex software systems, a variety of different languages can be used, e.g., architecture diagrams, behavior models, source code, etc. Maintaining these artifacts is a complex task, if the contained information is not completely disjoint. There are approaches that keep such redundancies consistent by propagating changes. This is, however, only possible if change descriptions are recorded or provided. Therefore, these change-driven approaches cannot be used to maintain existing software projects, which did not record all changes during development. This results in the need of developing a possibility for the integration of said projects. We therefore propose two different strategies for integrating existing artifacts into a change-driven approach: Our first strategy creates change histories for models, while the second strategy builds correspondences from given trace links and their attached artifacts. Furthermore, we suggest a number of criteria, which determine which strategy is best used, and when. In this paper, we applied our strategies to architectural models and object-oriented source code and used a reverse engineering tool to create the necessary trace links. We evaluated the applicability of our approach with several case studies, containing five real world architectural models and five medium-sized Java projects.