A reference architecture for integrated development and run-time environments

The need to support different stages of a software system's life-cycle in a software development environment has resulted in the emergence of plug-ins that can monitor and adapt the resulting system's run-time environment. In several recent self-adaptive systems, the existence of these plug-ins has resulted in the integration of the development and runtime environments. We introduce a novel reference architecture that captures the architectures of disparate development environments — from those, such as traditional development environments, that have no run-time plug-ins, to the ones, such as the recently emerging development environments, that are fully integrated with the run-time environments. This reference architecture aids the study and understanding of development environments. More importantly, adherence to the architecture improves the run-time availability of certain critical system facilities while reducing the resource consumption of the integrated development and run-time environments.