Dedal-CDL: Modeling First-class Architectural Changes in Dedal

In component-based software engineering, software architectures govern not only software development but also software evolution. Indeed, to efficiently and accurately manage software evolution and guarantee its quality, architecture models should be at the core of the evolution process, be accurately synchronized with the runtime systems and have their changes and version information be completely tracked. As architecture models are often captured by ADLs (Architecture Description Languages), an ADL supporting architecture-centric evolution is required. In this paper, we study how architecture-centric evolution can be supported by the Dedal ADL. We thus propose a dedicated CDL (Change Description Language) which models architectural changes as first-class entities and describes them from a semantic viewpoint.