Motivation

Models gain a steadily increasing importance in today’s software systems. Generators create great parts of a program’s code from models describing the needed functionality from a domain specific view, the execution of the software is monitored at runtime by comparing the actual behaviour of the system with a model of good behaviour and the hardware requirements can be forecast even in early development phase by analysing a model.
Models are a great aid to reduce the complexity of the software system so that analysis tools and humans can conceive it. Though, as program code does, models change during the software life-cycle. This evolution of a model often entails that other models must be changed as well. For example, if a new software component is added to the architecture, the performance model has to regard this component, too. The evolution of a model complying the evolution of an associated model is named co-evolution.
To support this often complex task we developed an extensible tool, so called "CoWolf", that enables model evolution and co-evolution management.

Co-Evolution as eclipse plug-in

The CoWolf tool is available as plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. The main features of CoWolf are

• allowing you to create architecture model and multiple QoS models of the same system
• allowing you to develop transformations between the models to help the evolution
• supporting you to keep multiple models consistent whenever they evolve
• integrating verification frameworks for QoS models

Built-in meta models

Out of the box CoWolf supports the creation & evolution of the following models:

• Component Diagram
• Sequence Diagram
• State Chart
• Fault Tree
• DTMC
• CTMC
• LQN

CoWolf also supports the co-evolution between the following models:

• Component Diagram --> Fault Tree
• State Chart <--> DTMC
• DTMC <--> CTMC
• Sequence Diagram --> LQN
• Fault Tree --> CTMC

Extend with own meta models

One of the main goals of the CoWolf project was to create an easily adaptable (co-)evolution framework. Therefore we provide some skeleton projects as well as a developer documentation. So, the CoWolf framework can easily be extended to support further models. CoWolf also makes use of configuration files that simply can be adopted to suit your needs.