ERCIM News - Evolving Software (original) (raw)

Abstract

As chair and member of the ERCIM Working Group on Software Evolution, we are honoured to act as guest editors for this issue of ERCIM News with the special theme of Evolving Software. The importance of software in our information society cannot be underestimated: just imagine what would happen if all software systems around us failed. There would be no television, no radio, no Internet, no financial transactions and e-commerce, no energy production, huge problems in public transport, and the list goes on. Software evolution will always remain inevitable due to a wide variety of factors: users that wish to have new features, bugs that need to be fixed, market pressure by competitors, technological changes in the environment with which the software needs to interact, performance issues that need to be dealt with, and so on. To accommodate these change requests, the software product needs to be changed and improved on a regular basis. In parallel to this, the software process itself is also subject to improvement, in order to produce new versions of the software more quickly and cost-effectively, without compromising software quality. This selection of papers in this special theme gives a clear overview of both traditional and emerging software engineering techniques, tools and approaches used by software evolution experts. Examples of such techniques are software/data analysis, data visualization, software metrics, software architecting, meta-programming, and more general paradigms like model-driven engineering (MDE) and software product line engineering (SPLE). These techniques provide a portfolio for tool developers to build dedicated software evolution tools. These tools are vital in order to better understand, manage and anticipate software evolution. We hope that these articles will convince you of the importance, relevance and challenges in software evolution research and practice in Europe. Enjoy!

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