Service-oriented toolchains for software evolution

Software evolution projects need to be supported by integrated toolchains, yet can suffer from inadequate tool interoperability. Practitioners are forced to deal with technical integration issues, instead of focusing on their projects' actual objectives. Lacking integration support, the resulting toolchains are rigid and inflexible, impeding project progress. This paper presents SENSEI, a service-oriented support framework for toolchain-building, that clearly separates software evolution needs from implementing tools and interoperability issues. It aims to improve interoperability using component-based principles, and provides model-driven code generation to partly automate the integration process. The approach has been prototypically implemented, and was applied in the context of the Q-MIG project, to build parts of an integrated software migration and quality assessment toolchain.