Dynamics and Mobility in Software Architecture

Dynamic adaptability and connguration of distributed software systems gain higher importance these days, as the upcoming of dynamic middleware like Jini or CORBA 3.0 seem to prove. However, todays software architecture concepts, including description techniques and methodologies are mostly static concepts. In this paper we describe some of the problems that show up by designing software systems that support dynamic and mobile behavior. We describe four diierent domains: types of architectural changes, relationships between changes, appropriate formalisms as well as description techniques. In this paper, we focus on two of them: types of change and description of dynamic architectures. We present Carp@ { a monitoring tool for dynamic, distributed Jini services { and illustrate with an example the problems, that come up by designing that kind of dynamic systems.