Software architecture modeling and representation became a main phase of the development process of complex systems. In fact, software architecture representation provides many advantages during all phases of software life cycle. Nevertheless, for many systems, like legacy or eroded ones, there is no available representation of their architectures. In order to benefit from this representation, we propose, in this paper, an approach called ROMANTIC which focuses on extracting the architecture of an object-oriented system. The main idea of this approach is to propose a quasi-automatic process of architecture recovery based on the quality characteristics of an architecture by formulating it as a search-based problem. This last acts on the space composed of all possible architectures abstracting the object-oriented system.

A cooperative information system (CIS) development process includes two main steps: Requirements Engineering (RE), that includes the following two phases: (organizational reality and the conception solution) and the step of Systems Engineering that involves the implementation phase of the solution. In this paper we focus on one of the critical steps of the development process of a CIS which is RE. CIS is a complex system; it involves the cooperation of many stakeholders in a common purpose and each with its own viewpoint. This complexity makes more difficult the design; RE phase is therefore a crucial phase of the development life cycle of a CIS. This leads us to propose a meta-model which allows defining the RE phase of a CIS. We used for that a notion of software engineering: the viewpoints, in order to decompose and partition the needs of a CIS according to the viewpoint of each stakeholder, to simplify its modeling and overcome their complexity. This model-driven approach which is based on a requirements meta-model of a CIS using viewpoints, will allow us to instance the necessary viewpoints to define the needs and requirements of a CIS.

The purpose of this study is to find the right model to plan and predict future evolution paths of an evolving software architecture based on past evolution data. Thus, in this paper, a model to represent the software architecture evolution process is defined. In order to collect evolution data, a simple formalism allowing to easily express software architecture evolution data is introduced. The sequential pattern extraction technique is applied to the collected evolution styles of an evolving software architecture in order to predict and plan the future evolution paths. A learning and prediction model is defined to generate the software architecture possible future evolution paths. A method for evaluating the generated paths is presented. In addition, we explain and validate our approach through a study on two examples of evolution of component-oriented software architecture.

Composing an application out of independent, reusable pieces has been a key challenge since the early days of software engineering. In this paper we examine some aspects of software architecture. We introduce our COSA+ model built in order to provide some enhancement in the COSA one. Our main contributions are the new structure given to an explicit connector, and the conceptual view of the different abstract levels used to define the applications architectures. Profits expected from these improvements are numerous; mainly we can quote the reduction of the production costs and the time to market, simplify the maintenance operations, and foresee supports for the evolution of the software architecture.

International audience—This paper aims to define an adaptive guidance for software process modeling. The proposed guidance approach is based on development's profile context (actor's role in the process, actor's qualification and related activities in progress). We introduce new guidance concepts through adaptive guidance meta-model (AGM) allowing specific assistance interventions (corrective, constructive and automatic guidance). We illustrate our guidance approach using SPEM formalism extended with these new guidance concepts