Supporting Evolution of SDL-based Systems: Industrial Experience

Stentofon, a Norwegian company producing customized internal communication systems, uses SDL and automatic code generation for software development. A crucial issue for the success of the approach in this industrial context turns out to be efficient handling of system variants and evolution. The paper starts with a description of the approach to software development currently used at Stentofon, and highlights why evolution support is an important problem area in their product development. The paper then describes the PROTEUS* approach to supporting system evolution, and assesses the extent to which this has been successful in its practical application to SDL-based product development at Stentofon. The paper concludes with a summary of the lessons learned from this work.