Continuous API Evolution in Heterogenous Enterprise Software Systems
This addresses the problem of interface evolution for developers in enterprise software, but appears incremental as it builds on existing approaches.
The paper tackles the challenge of maintaining interface compatibility during independent deployment in heterogeneous enterprise software systems, presenting an approach that is easy for developers to use and addresses legacy system integration.
The ability to independently deploy parts of a software system is one of the cornerstones of modern software development, and allows for these parts to evolve independently and at different speeds. A major challenge of such independent deployment, however, is to ensure that despite their individual evolution, the interfaces between interacting parts remain compatible. This is especially important for enterprise software systems, which are often highly integrated and based on heterogenous IT infrastructures. Although several approaches for interface evolution have been proposed, many of these rely on the developer to adhere to certain rules, but provide little guidance for doing so. In this paper, we present an approach for interface evolution that is easy to use for developers, and also addresses typical challenges of heterogenous enterprise software, especially legacy system integration.