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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