Abstract

From a maintenance perspective, only software that is well understood can evolve in a controlled and high-quality manner. Software evolution itself is a knowledge-driven process that requires the use and integration of different knowledge resources. The authors present a formal representation of an existing process model to support the evolution of software systems by representing knowledge resources and the process model using a common representation based on ontologies and description logics. This formal representation supports the use of reasoning services across different knowledge resources, allowing for the inference of explicit and implicit relations among them. Furthermore, an interactive story metaphor is introduced to guide maintainers during their software evolution activities and to model the interactions between the users, knowledge resources and process model.

History

Received 31 July 2007; revised 22 February 2008; published online 4 August 2008

Reference

Juergen Rilling, Wen Jun Meng, René Witte, and Philippe Charland. Story Driven Approach to Software Evolution. IET Software, Volume 2, Number 4, August 2008, pp.304–320. Special Section on Software Evolvability.

Bibtex entry (also for download):

@article{RMWC08,
  title = {{Story Driven Approach to Software Evolution}},
  author = {Juergen Rilling and Wen Jun Meng and 
            Ren\'{e} Witte and Philippe Charland},
  journal = {IET Software},
  month = {August},
  number = {4},
  pages = {304--320},
  volume = {2},
  year = {2008}
}

Download

Published version: doi 10.1049/iet-sen:20070095
Postprint version: ietsoft2008-story.pdf

Copyright © 2008 The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). This paper is a postprint of a paper submitted to and accepted for publication in IET Software and is subject to Institution of Engineering and Technology Copyright. The copy of record is available at the IET Digital Library, doi: 10.1049/iet-sen:20070095.