The ERCIM Working Group on Software Evolution is celebrating its 5th anniversary. On this occasion, we review the goals that we have set ourselves and have a look at what we have achieved so far. We also look forward by revisiting and updating the ...

IWPSE was born in a project which has started 10 years ago, supported by Japanese government, and involved most of representative researchers on software in Japan for studying how to build evolvable software. IWPSE served as a window of the project to ...

With the rapid growth of web services and socio-technical ecosystems, the management complexity of these modern, decentralized, distributed computing systems presents significant challenges for businesses and often exceeds the capabilities of human ...

Patch review is the basic mechanism for validating the design and implementation of patches and maintaining consistency in some commercial and Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. We examine the inner-workings of the development process of ...

What is the future of software evolution? In 1974, Meir M. Lehman had a vision of software evolution being driven by empirical studies of software repositories, and of a theory based on those empirical results. However, that scenario is yet to come. ...

This paper discusses a proposal for the visualization of software evolution, with a focus on combining insight on changes that affect software metrics at project and class level, the project structure, the class hierarchy and the viewing of source code ...

Separating the evolution of an application from the evolution of its persistent data, or from the evolution of the database system used to store the data can have collateral effects, such as data loss, program failure, or decreased performance. In this ...

System life cycle tends to be longer in military applications, reaching over 30 years in specific examples. Development and maintenance of software contained by these systems are regulated by software development standards. Such standards are being ...

Software Product Line Engineering entails the strategic development of software assets that are to be reused many times across the members of a product line. Assuring that the investment in reuse holds over time is an important requirement in this case. ...

A library is available in multiple versions. Which one should I use? Has it been widely adopted already? Was it a good decision to switch to the newest version? We have mined hundreds of open-source projects for their library dependencies, and ...

A key step in the evolution of a Java system towards the aspect oriented paradigm is the identification of crosscutting concerns that need to be refactored.

This paper proposes an approach to identify concerns and the crosscutting among them in existing ...

Traditional approaches to migrate a legacy system toward SOA are based on code isolation strategies to extract Web services code, i.e. portions of code devoted to implement the functionalities of interest. Usually these approaches produce good SOA ...

The version history of a software system contains a wealth of information that can assist developers in their daily implementation and maintenance tasks. By reasoning over the role of certain code entities in previous versions of the system, developers ...

Adaptive programming (AP) is a programming paradigm for expressing structure-shy computations over semi-structured data graphs. Structure-shyness means that adaptive programs hard code a minimal set of assumptions about the structure of their input. ...

Keeping a software system conformant with a desired architecture and consistent with good design principles is a recurring task during the software evolution process. Deviations from good design principles can manifest in the form of bad smells: ...

This paper proposes an effective framework for the assume-guarantee verification of component-based software in the context of component evolution at system design level. In this framework, when a component is evolved after adapting some refinements, we ...

Software process data gathered from bug tracking databases and version control system log files are a very valuable source to analyze the evolution and history of a project or predict its future. These data are used for instance to predict defects, ...

To be able to examine software evolution - variation in software over a sequence of releases - or to compare differing versions of software with each other, we need to be able to measure artefacts representative of the software or its creation process. ...

As open source software products have evolved over time to satisfy a variety of demands from increasing users, they have become large and complex in general. Open source developers often face with challenges in fixing a considerable amount of bugs which ...

We introduce a Web 2.0 application for sharing research information within a community of collaborating researchers. The application extends the social networking application Facebook with support for visualising how researchers belonging to the same ...

Communication between developers plays a very central role in team-based software development for a variety of tasks such as coordinating development and maintenance activities, discussing requirements for better comprehension, assessing alternative ...