ELSE

European Laboratory for Software Evolution

We propose the creation of an e-research facility with the working title European Laboratory for Software Evolution (ELSE). Our motivation is that a significant obstacle to progress in researching evolutionary phenomena in software-intensive systems is the difficulty of conducting realistic, industrial-scale investigations, especially for small research teams operating at arm’s- length from each other. ELSE will address this problem by providing a virtual research environment (VRE) where researchers in software evolution and related fields can find annotated collections of data, tools, patterns and templates, ‘how-to’ documents, previous results, and access to expertise in using them. The Laboratory will provide an on-line environment where researchers and practitioners can share research facilities and experiences and seek partners in projects. ELSE’s concerns will encompass both the social and the engineering aspects of evolution in software-intensive systems, and will therefore draw on existing achievements in both e-social science and e-science. It will create an exciting and innovative facility that will be attractive to researchers in fields ranging from software engineering, through informatics and business history to society and technology studies and anthropology. We are actively seeking both academic and industrial partners who will join us in taking this vision forward.