Explicit Concern-Driven Development with ArchEvol

Supporting developers in examining and evolving a software system in terms of concerns is considered a critical capability in the face of the scale and complexity of today´s software. A number of existing approaches make an inroad to providing this support, but they fall short in key ways. This paper introduces ArchEvol, a new programming environment that embodies a new kind of approach, one we term explicit concern-driven development. The vision is threefold: (1) a fine-grained concern model maps concerns to code, (2) concerns are visualized at both the code level, to assist in the actual act of making changes, and the architectural level, to assist in gauging levels of scattering and tangling, and (3) automated support assists developers in maintaining the concern mapping over time. Developers, then, continuously examine, structure, and modify the software they produce in terms of concerns. We introduce our approach, discuss how we have realized it in ArchEvol, and present the results of a first set of evaluations that demonstrate its potential.