Usage- and Rationale-based Evolution Desicison Support

• Antragstellerinnen / Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Bernd Brügge; Professorin Dr. Barbara Paech
• Fachliche Zuordnung: Softwaretechnik und Programmiersprachen
• Förderung: Förderung von 2012 bis 2016
• Projektkennung: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 221324226

For software evolution decisions developers need knowledge of the current and future deployment context as well as knowledge of the software and its development artifacts. Typically this knowledge is documented only partially and often only in unrelated fragments, and therefore it is not fully exploitable. In addition, the reasoning underlying the decisions made in previous releases can also change. Thus, it is an important challenge to ease the capture of this knowledge and to improve the decision process. The vision of the URES project is a continuous decision process over the whole software life-cycle where • Developers reflect the actual user behavior in their evolution decisions. User behavior is automatically captured during operation and related to system models so that necessary changes to the software can be identified. • Developers reflect system, project and operation knowledge in their long-term decisions and in particular the rationale of decisions made for previous releases. Links between system, project and operation knowledge are automatically captured and maintained. This allows providing consistent linkage between decisions and artifacts (incl. code) through rationale so that the impact of changes of the artifacts on the decisions and vice versa can be analyzed. To empirically validate this vision we will develop corresponding methods and tools and apply them both, in a research environment and in an industrial case study, to a long-running system.

• DFG-Verfahren: Schwerpunktprogramme
• Teilprojekt zu: SPP 1593: Design for Future - Managed Software Evolution