A development process based on variability modeling for building adaptive software architectures

Adaptive software is a class of software which is able to dynamically modify at runtime its own internal structure and hence its behavior in response to changes in its operating environment. Adaptive software development has been an emerging research area of software engineering in the last decade. Many existing approaches use techniques issued from software product lines (SPLs) to develop adaptive software. They propose tools, frameworks or languages to build adaptive software architectures (ASAs) but do not guide developers on the process of using them. In this paper, we propose an adaptive software architecture development process to guide developers building an ASA. One of the important activities of this development process is software specification based on models. In our process, we propose to use the models and basic tools of Common Variability Language (CVL, proposed as an OMG standard) to generate an ASA and a subprocess to specify these models.