Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

ERCIM Working Group on Software Evolution

Numerous scientific studies of large-scale software systems have shown that the bulk of the total software-development cost is devoted to software maintenance. 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.

The main goal of the proposed WG (http://w3.umh.ac.be/evol/ ) is to identify a set of formally-founded techniques and associated tools 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.

Triskell contributes to this working group on the following points:

• re-engineering and reverse engineering

• model-driven software engineering and model transformation

• impact analysis, effort estimation, cost prediction, evolution metrics

• traceability analysis and change propagation

• family and product-line engineering