EVOLVE: adaptive specification techniques for object-oriented software evolution

The increased complexity of object oriented models necessitates the enhancement of adaptiveness and robustness of an object oriented design towards changing requirements. The understanding of what properties are critical for construction of an adaptive schema design becomes increasingly important in software evolution. We present two groups of techniques for enhancing the adaptiveness and the robustness of an object oriented design in anticipation of future requirement changes. The first group of techniques consists of a selection of adaptive schema style rules for achieving validity, minimality, extensibility and normality of a schema design. This set of style rules can be used as a means for validating quality of a schema, and for transforming an object oriented schema into a more robust style. The second group of techniques includes the use of propagation patterns and propagation pattern refinement for adaptive behavioral specification and abstraction