Co-evolving application code and design models by exploiting meta-data

• Authors: Walter Cazzola;Sonia Pini;Ahmed Ghoneim;Gunter Saake
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM symposium on Applied computing
• Year: 2007

Evolvability and adaptability are intrinsic properties of today's software applications. Unfortunately, the urgency of evolving/adapting a system often drives the developer to directly modify the application code neglecting to update its design models. Even, most of the development environments support the code refactoring without supporting the refactoring of the design information. Refactoring, evolution and in general every change to the code should be reflected into the design models, so that these models consistently represent the application and can be used as documentation in the successive maintenance steps. The code evolution should not evolve only the application code but also its design models. Unfortunately, to co-evolve the application code and its design is a hard job to be carried out automatically, since there is an evident and notorious gap between these two representations. We propose a new approach to code evolution (in particular to code refactoring) that supports the automatic co-evolution of the design models. The approach relies on a set of predefined metadata that the developer should use to annotate the application code and to highlight the refactoring performed on the code. Then, these meta-data are retrieved through reflection and used to automatically and coherently update the application design models.