R. Morrison, D. Balasubramaniam, and K. Falkner (Eds.): ECSA 2008, LNCS 5292, p. 1, 2008. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008

Issues in Architecture Evolution: Using Design Intent in Maintenance and Controlling Dynamic Evolution

Dewayne E. Perry

The University of Texas at Austin, USA perry@ece.utexas.edu

Abstract. Issues in Architecture Evolution: 1) Using design intent in mainte-nance & 2) Controlling dynamic evolution In this keynote talk I will address two issues in software architecture evolution. In Alex Wolf's and my original architecture model, we proposed rationale as one of the major components. Over the years very little has been explored about this issue. The primary pur-pose of rationale was to record architecture design intent: why are things the way they are? It is only recently that architecture researchers have become in-terested in capturing design intent. Unfortunately the focus has been (as it was in the 80's on capturing design decisions) on what can we capture and how. I will focus instead on the problem of what design intent do we need when we evolve the architecture design and discuss the work I am doing with my student Paul Grisham. There are a number of interesting contexts where the dynamic evolution of software architectures are of critical importance - for example, self-managing, self-adapting systems, etc. Another interesting context is that of simulating very large, very complex systems. In all these cases, the control of dynamic architecture evolution is a critical issue. In the case of complex simu-lations we have foreknowledge (indeed, control) of the desired architecture evo-lution. I will focus on our approach in handling this issue in this context. While this is a fairly narrow context, I believe our approach has applicability in a wider context.

Keywords: Design intent, dynamic evolution, architectural maintenance.