Versioning and Evolution Requirements for Model-Based System Development

Information systems are exposed to constantly changing environments which require constant updating. Moreover, security is an increasingly important quality facet in modern information systems and needs to be retained. Thus, long-living software systems “ages” not by wearing out, but by failing to keep up-to-date with its environment. In model-based system development, this leads to a continuously changing information system model accordingly. The problem is that software engineers cannot simply overview changes of the system model and their impact on the applied security model. To overcome this problem, a semantic representation of model changes is needed which is determined from fine-grained edit operations. Based on the semantic representation of system model changes, an evolution strategy of the associated security model can be chosen. In this paper, we discuss challenges and problems that arise from the granularity of the change operations as well as the selection of different evolution strategies which can be performed interleaved.