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2014 | Buch

Evolving Software Systems

herausgegeben von: Tom Mens, Alexander Serebrenik, Anthony Cleve

Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

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Über dieses Buch

During the last few years, software evolution research has explored new domains such as the study of socio-technical aspects and collaboration between different individuals contributing to a software system, the use of search-based techniques and meta-heuristics, the mining of unstructured software repositories, the evolution of software requirements, and the dynamic adaptation of software systems at runtime. Also more and more attention is being paid to the evolution of collections of inter-related and inter-dependent software projects, be it in the form of web systems, software product families, software ecosystems or systems of systems.

With this book, the editors present insightful contributions on these and other domains currently being intensively explored, written by renowned researchers in the respective fields of software evolution. Each chapter presents the state of the art in a particular topic, as well as the current research, available tool support and remaining challenges. The book is complemented by a glossary of important terms used in the community, a reference list of nearly 1,000 papers and books and tips on additional resources that may be useful to the reader (reference books, journals, standards and major scientific events in the domain of software evolution and datasets).

This book is intended for all those interested in software engineering, and more particularly, software maintenance and evolution. Researchers and software practitioners alike will find in the contributed chapters an overview of the most recent findings, covering a broad spectrum of software evolution topics. In addition, it can also serve as the basis of graduate or postgraduate courses on e.g., software evolution, requirements engineering, model-driven software development or social informatics.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Evolving Software Artefacts

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. An Overview of Requirements Evolution
Summary
Changing requirements are widely regarded as one of the most significant risks for software systems development. However, in today’s business landscape, these changing requirements also represent opportunities to exploit new and evolving business conditions. In consonance with other agile methods, we advocate requirements engineering techniques that embrace and accommodate requirements change. This agile approach to requirements must nonetheless be systematic and incorporate some degree of planning, especially with respect to accommodating quality attributes such as safety and security. This chapter examines the nature of requirements evolution, and the two main problems that it entails. The first is to correctly understand what is changing in the requirements, that is, the elicitation problem. The other is to act on that new information using models and other representations of the requirements, influencing the architecture and implementation of the software system. This chapter first motivates the importance of considering changing requirements in evolving software systems. It then surveys historical and existing approaches to requirements evolution with respect to the elicitation and taking action problems. Finally, the chapter describes a framework for supporting requirements evolution, defining the Requirements Evolution Problem as finding new specifications to satisfy changed requirements and domain assumptions. To motivate this, we discuss a real-life case study of the payment card industry.
Neil Ernst, Alexander Borgida, Ivan J. Jureta, John Mylopoulos
Chapter 2. Coupled Evolution of Software Metamodels and Models
Summary
In model–driven software engineering, software models are the primary engineering artifacts which are built using dedicated modeling languages. In response, modeling languages are receiving increased adoption to improve software engineering in industry, and thus their maintenance is gaining importance. Like software, modeling languages and thus their metamodels are subject to evolution due to changing requirements. When a metamodel evolves, models may no longer conform to it. To be able to use these models with the new modeling language, they need to be migrated. Metamodel evolution and the corresponding model migration are coupled. In this chapter, we introduce the problem, classify it, and discuss how it can be addressed. To get a feeling about the extent of the problem in practice, we give an overview of the empirical results that are available in the literature. We then present different approaches to the problem and classify them according to a number of features. Finally, we give an overview of the available tools and compare them to each other, before we conclude the chapter with directions for future work.
Markus Herrmannsdörfer, Guido Wachsmuth
Chapter 3. Software Product Quality Models
Summary
Both for software developers and managers it is crucial to have information about different aspects of the quality of their systems. This chapter gives a brief overview about the history of software product quality measurement, focusing on software maintainability, and the existing approaches and high-level models for characterizing software product quality. The most widely accepted and used practical maintainability models and the state-of-the-art works in the subject are introduced. These models play a very important role in software evolution by allowing to estimate future development costs, assess risks, or support management decisions. Based on objective aspects, the implementations of the most popular software maintainability models are compared and evaluated. The evaluation includes the Quality Index, SQALE, SQUALE, SIG, QUAMOCO, and Columbus Quality Model. The chapter presents the result of comparing the features and stability of the tools and the different models on a large number of open-source Java projects.
Rudolf Ferenc, Péter Hegedűs, Tibor Gyimóthy

Techniques

Frontmatter
Chapter 4. Search Based Software Maintenance: Methods and Tools
Summary
Software evolution is an effort-prone activity, and requires developers to make complex and difficult decisions. This entails the development of automated approaches to support various software evolution-related tasks, for example aimed at suggesting refactoring or remodularization actions. Finding a solution to these problems is intrinsically NP-hard, and exhaustive approaches are not viable due to the size and complexity of many software projects. Therefore, during recent years, several software-evolution problems have been formulated as optimization problems, and resolved with meta-heuristics.
This chapter overviews how search-based optimization techniques can support software engineers in a number of software evolution tasks. For each task, we illustrate how the problem can be encoded as a search-based optimization problem, and how meta-heuristics can be used to solve it. Where possible, we refer to some tools that can be used to deal with such tasks.
Gabriele Bavota, Massimiliano Di Penta, Rocco Oliveto
Chapter 5. Mining Unstructured Software Repositories
Summary
Mining software repositories, which is the process of analyzing the data related to software development practices, is an emerging field of research which aims to improve software evolutionary tasks. The data in many software repositories is unstructured (for example, the natural language text in bug reports), making it particularly difficult to mine and analyze. In this chapter, we survey tools and techniques for mining unstructured software repositories, with a focus on information retrieval models. In addition, we discuss several software engineering tasks that can be enhanced by leveraging unstructured data, including bug prediction, clone detection, bug triage, feature location, code search engines, traceability link recovery, evolution and trend analysis, bug localization, and more. Finally, we provide a hands-on tutorial for using an IR model on an unstructured repository to perform a software engineering task.
Stephen W. Thomas, Ahmed E. Hassan, Dorothea Blostein
Chapter 6. LeveragingWeb 2.0 for software evolution
Summary
In this era of Web 2.0, much information is available on the Internet. Software forums, mailing lists, and question-and-answer sites contain lots of technical information. Blogs contain developers’ opinions, ideas, and descriptions of their day-to-day activities. Microblogs contain recent and popular software news. Software forges contain records of socio-technical interactions of developers. All these resources could potentially be leveraged to help developers in performing software evolution activities. In this chapter, we first present information that is available from these Web 2.0 resources. We then introduce empirical studies that investigate how developers contribute information to and use these resources. Next, we elaborate on recent technologies and tools that could mine pieces of information from these resources to aid developers in performing their software evolution activities. We especially present tools that support information search, information discovery, and project management activities by analyzing software forums, mailing lists, question-and-answer sites, microblogs, and software forges. We also briefly highlight open problems and potential future work in this new and promising research area of leveraging Web 2.0 to improve software evolution activities.
Yuan Tian, David Lo

Evolution of specific types of software systems

Frontmatter
Chapter 7. Evolution of Web Systems
Summary
The World Wide Web has led to a new kind of software, web systems, which are based on web technologies. Just like software in other domains, web systems have evolution challenges. This chapter discusses evolution of web systems on three dimensions: architecture, (conceptual) design, and technology. For each of these dimensions we introduce the state-of-the-art in the techniques and tools that are currently available. In order to place current evolution techniques into context, we also provide a survey of the different kinds of web systems as they have emerged, tracing the most important achievements of web systems evolution research from static web sites over dynamic web applications and web services to Ajax-based Rich Internet Applications.
Holger M. Kienle, Damiano Distante
Chapter 8. Runtime Evolution of Highly Dynamic Software
Summary
Highly dynamic software systems are applications whose operations are particularly affected by changing requirements and uncertainty in their execution environments. Ideally such systems must evolve while they execute. To achieve this, highly dynamic software systems must be instrumented with self-adaptation mechanisms to monitor selected requirements and environment conditions to assess the need for evolution, plan desired changes, as well as validate and verify the resulting system. This chapter introduces fundamental concepts, methods, and techniques gleaned from self-adaptive systems engineering, as well as discusses their application to runtime evolution and their relationship with off-line software evolution theories. To illustrate the presented concepts, the chapter revisits a case study conducted as part of our research work, where self-adaptation techniques allow the engineering of a dynamic context monitoring infrastructure that is able to evolve at runtime. In other words, the monitoring infrastructure supports changes in monitoring requirements without requiring maintenance tasks performed manually by developers. The goal of this chapter is to introduce practitioners, researchers and students to the foundational elements of self-adaptive software, and their application to the continuos evolution of software systems at runtime.
Hausi Müller, Norha Villegas
Chapter 9. Evolution of Software Product Lines
Summary
A Software Product Line (SPL) aims to support the development of a family of similar software products from a common set of shared assets. SPLs represent a long-term investment and have a considerable life-span. In order to realize a return-on-investment, companies dealing with SPLs often plan their product portfolios and software engineering activities strategically over many months or years ahead. Compared to single system engineering, SPL evolution exhibits higher complexity due to the variability and the interdependencies between products. This chapter provides an overview on concepts and challenges in SPL evolution and summarizes the state of the art. For this we first describe the general process for SPL evolution and general modeling concepts to specify SPL evolution. On this base, we provide an overview on the state-of-the-art in each of the main process tasks which are migration towards SPLs, analysis of (existing) SPL evolution, planning of future SPL evolution, and implementation of SPL evolution.
Goetz Botterweck, Andreas Pleuss
Chapter 10. Studying Evolving Software Ecosystems based on Ecological Models
Summary
Research on software evolution is very active, but evolutionary principles, models and theories that properly explain why and how software systems evolve over time are still lacking. Similarly, more empirical research is needed to understand how different software projects co-exist and co-evolve, and how contributors collaborate within their encompassing software ecosystem.
In this chapter, we explore the differences and analogies between natural ecosystems and biological evolution on the one hand, and software ecosystems and software evolution on the other hand. The aim is to learn from research in ecology to advance the understanding of evolving software ecosystems. Ultimately, we wish to use such knowledge to derive diagnostic tools aiming to predict survival of software projects within their ecosystem, to analyse and optimise the fitness of software projects in their environment, and to help software project communities in managing their projects better.
Tom Mens, Maálick Claes, Philippe Grosjean, Alexander Serebrenik
Backmatter
Metadaten
Titel
Evolving Software Systems
herausgegeben von
Tom Mens
Alexander Serebrenik
Anthony Cleve
Copyright-Jahr
2014
Verlag
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Electronic ISBN
978-3-642-45398-4
Print ISBN
978-3-642-45397-7
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45398-4