A Generic Framework for Integrating New Functionnalities into Software Architectures

Integrating new functionalities into a software architecture is necessary when the application must evolve to cope with new context and user requirements. The architect has thus to manually modify the architecture description, which is often tedious and error prone. In this paper, we propose FIESTA, a generic framework for automatically integrating new functionalities into an architecture description. Our approach is inspired by TranSAT, an integration framework. However, TranSAT is dedicated to a specific architecture description language (ADL) while our approach is ADL-independent. To do so, we have performed a domain analysis, studying for many ADLs how to integrate new functionalities. Based on our domain analysis, we have defined a generic ADL model to manipulate and reason about architectural elements that are involved in integration. Furthermore, we have defined high-level abstractions to describe different kinds of integration. Finally, we have developed a generic integration engine.