Design for future: managed software evolution

Abstract

Innovative software engineering methodologies, concepts and tools which focus on supporting the ongoing evolution of complex software, in particular regarding its continuous adaptation to changing functional and quality requirements as well as platforms over a long period are required. Supporting such a co-evolution of software sys-tems along with their environment represents a very chal-lenging undertaking, as it requires a combination or even integration of approaches and insights from different soft-ware engineering disciplines. To meet these challenges, the Priority Programme 1593 Design for Future—Managed Soft-ware Evolution has been established, funded by the German We would like to thank Zoya Durdik, Gregor Engels, Christof Momm, Andreas Rausch, and Stefan Sauer for their contributions and all projects of the priority programme for providing details on their goals and collaborations. Research Foundation, to develop fundamental methodolo-gies and a focused approach for long-living software sys-tems, maintaining high quality and supporting evolution dur-ing the whole life cycle. The goal of the priority programme is integrated and focused research in software engineering to develop methods for the continuous evolution of software and software/hardware systems for making systems adaptable to changing requirements and environments. For evaluation, we focus on two specific application domains: information systems and production systems in automation engineering. In particular two joint case studies from these application domains promote close collaborations among the individ-ual projects of the priority programme. We consider several research topics that are of common interest, for instance co-evolution of models and implementation code, of models and tests, and among various types of models. Another research topic of common interest are run-time models to automati-cally synchronise software systems with their abstract mod-els through continuous system monitoring. Both concepts, co-evolution and run-time models contribute to our vision to which we refer to as knowledge carrying software. We con-sider this as a major need for a long life of such software systems.