SEA: An UML Profile for Software Evolution Analysis in Design Phase

Software evolution is one of the software process activities that occupies a major percentage of
software development cost. Since requirements change continually and new technologies emerge,
software should be adapted to satisfy these new changes to continue to survive. Despite software
evolution being performed after software validation and deployment, software developers should
predict at earlier stages how software would evolve in the future to avoid surprises. Although
many works focus on how to enhance the program structure to facilitate maintenance tasks,
only few works treat software evolution in earlier phases of software development process. In
this direction, we propose an UML profile that permits to tackle software maintenance issues
at the early phases of software development process. The proposed approach helps software
developers to predict in design phase the kind of maintenance tasks that could occur in the
future