Many studies of complex software systems have shown that more than 80% of the total cost of software development is devoted to software maintenance. This is mainly due to the need for software systems to evolve in the face of changing requirements. In some cases, software evolution may need to be dynamic, with changes being performed on running systems.
Despite the importance of software evolution, techniques and technologies that offer support for software evolution are far from ideal. In particular, unanticipated requirement changes are not well supported, although they account for most of the technical complications and related costs of evolving software.

By definition, unanticipated software evolution (USE) is not something for which we can prepare during the design of a software system. Therefore, support for such evolution in programming languages, and component models and related runtime infrastructures becomes a key issue. Without it, unanticipated changes often force software engineers to perform extensive invasive modification of existing designs and code.

This one-day workshop will address the issues inherent in static and dynamic evolution of object-oriented and component based systems. The goal of the workshop is to discuss new approaches and technologies for building large-scale evolvable software systems.

Last modified on Feb 11, 2002.
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