Requirements driven software evolution

Abstract

Software evolution is an integral part of the software life cycle. Furthermore in the recent years the issue of keeping legacy systems operational in new platforms has become critical and one of the top priorities in IT departments worldwide. The research community and the industry have responded to these challenges by investigating and proposing techniques for analyzing, transforming, integrating, and porting software systems to new platforms, languages, and operating environments. However, measuring and ensuring that compliance of the migrant system with specific target requirements have not been formally and thoroughly addressed. We believe that issues such as the identification, measurement, and evaluation of specific re-engineering and transformation strategies and their impact on the quality of the migrant system pose major challenges in the software re-engineering community. Other related problems include the verification, validation, and testing of migrant systems, and the design of techniques for keeping various models (architecture, design, source code) during evolution, synchronized. In this working session, we plan to assess the state of the art in these areas, discuss on-going work, and identify further research issues.