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The 7th International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology (QUATIC 2010), to be held in Porto, Portugal, from 29 September to 2 October 2010, will have a thematic track on Quality Evolution in ICT. Submissions are due 11 April.

The 4th International Joint ERCIM/IWPSE Symposium on Software Evolution will be held in Antwerp (20-21 September 2010), co-located with the IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2010).

The 36th EuroMicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advances Applications (SEAA 2010) in Lille (1-3 September 2010) will host a track on the Evolution of Distributed, Internet-based and Service-Oriented applicatioNs (EDISON). Submissions are requested by 15 March 2010.

As part of the conference Computing Professionals (CP 2010), a Workshop on Industrial Software Evolution and Maintenance Processes (WISEMP'10) will be held on 22 April 2010 in Montréal, Québec, Canada. Submissions are due 15 February 2010.

A special issue in IEEE Software on the theme Software Evolution: Maintaining Stakeholders' Satisfaction in a Changing World, co-edited by some of our members, is scheduled for publication in July/August 2010.

In December 2009 we organised BENEVOL 2009, the annual Belgian-Dutch software evolution seminar. Best papers will be submitted in a special issue of Science of Computer Programming.

Research Context

Numerous scientific studies of large-scale software systems have shown that most of the effort and cost spent in large software projects goes to the maintenance and evolution of existing software systems as opposed to the development of new systems from scratch. This is mainly due to the fact that software systems need to evolve continually to cope with ever-changing software requirements. Today, this is more than ever the case. Nevertheless, existing tools that try to provide support for evolution have many limitations. They are (programming) language dependent, not scalable, difficult to integrate with other tools, and they lack formal foundations.

Goals

The main goal of the proposed WG is to understand the phenomenon of software evolution, and to develop well-founded and disciplined tools and techniques to support software developers with the common problems they encounter when evolving large and complex software systems. With this initiative, we plan to become a Virtual European Research and Training Centre on Software Evolution.

Topics

The kind of evolution problems that will be addressed by this WG are very diverse. Below we mention a tentative, but inevitably incomplete, list of topics that will be addressed:

• re-engineering and reverse engineering
• software restructuring, refactoring and renovation
• model-driven software engineering and model transformation
• migration and revitalisation of legacy software
• specification or analysis of the evolution of all types of software artifacts at all levels (e.g., requirement specifications, models, metamodels, architectures, programs, test cases, documentation, bug reports, version control information, log files, release histories, language descriptions, APIs, protocols)
• consistency maintenance and inconsistency management
• co-evolution and conformance checking of architecture, design and implementation
• impact analysis, effort estimation, cost prediction, evolution metrics
• traceability analysis and change propagation
• version control, release history analysis and configuration management
• run-time adaptation and dynamic reconfiguration
• product family and product-line engineering
• methods, processes and tools for managing software evolution
• development of a formal theory of software and systems evolution