A Framework for Agile Development of Component-Based Applications

TL;DR

This paper introduces CALICO, a model-based framework that integrates agile and component-based development, enabling continuous testing and safe evolution of applications throughout the development cycle.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework that synchronizes application models with runtime views, allowing automatic testing and safe incremental updates during development.

Findings

CALICO supports iterative development with automatic runtime testing.

The framework enables safe propagation of model changes without introducing errors.

CALICO's approach facilitates continuous validation and evolution of applications.

Abstract

Agile development processes and component-based software architectures are two software engineering approaches that contribute to enable the rapid building and evolution of applications. Nevertheless, few approaches have proposed a framework to combine agile and component-based development, allowing an application to be tested throughout the entire development cycle. To address this problematic, we have built CALICO, a model-based framework that allows applications to be safely developed in an iterative and incremental manner. The CALICO approach relies on the synchronization of a model view, which specifies the application properties, and a runtime view, which contains the application in its execution context. Tests on the application specifications that require values only known at runtime, are automatically integrated by CALICO into the running application, and the captured needed values are reified at execution time to resume the tests and inform the architect of potential problems. Any modification at the model level that does not introduce new errors is automatically propagated to the running system, allowing the safe evolution of the application. In this paper, we illustrate the CALICO development process with a concrete example and provide information on the current implementation of our framework.