A Reuse-driven approach to update Component-Based Software Architectures

As the maintenance of software architectures emerges as a discipline within software engineering, it becomes increasingly important to propose new approaches to manage and facilitate it. In this paper we propose and describe the updating style as a reusable unit filling the gap between full-reusable solution and full-usable ones. Our updating styles aims at capitalizing update expertise, or know-hows, within component-based architectures for use and re-use purposes. An updating style is a family of update procedures dedicated to a business domain, sharing common tasks that have to be performed in the quite same order, to update a software architecture in a proven and safe way. The primary ideas of this research are: (a) an updating style is a building block to create increasingly complex update procedures by reuse; (b) an updating style is expressed on an architectural family, whose specific update procedures can be derived through instantiations; and (c) some updating styles can be run, after ad-hoc projections on environments