Reduction of syntactical incompatibilities in multi component upgrades through intelligent component swapping

Emerging component-based software development architectures promise better re-use of software components, greater flexibility, scalability and higher quality of services. But like any other piece of software too, software components are hardly perfect, when being created. Problems and bugs have to be fixed and new features need to be added. This paper will give an introduction to the problem of component evolution and the syntactical incompatibilities which result during necessary multi component upgrades. The authors present an approach for the detection of such incompatibilities between multiple generations of component versions and present a solution for automated versioning of relevant component facets. The main concern of the paper will be the automated reconfiguration of component based software systems by intelligent swapping of component versions to find conflict free system states.