Formal foundations of software evolution

Abstract

The workshop on Formal Foundations of Software Evolution was co-located with the 5th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR 2001), which took place at the Centro de Congressos do Instituto Superior Tcnico in Lisbon, Portugal, March 14 to 16, 2001. The workshop was organised in the context of the Scientific Research Network on Foundations of Software Evolution. This is a research consortium coordinated by the Programming Technology Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium), and it involves 9 research institutes from universities in 5 different European countries (Belgium, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Portugal). The consortium is financed by the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders (Belgium).One full day was allocated for the workshop (March 13, 2001). There were 14 participants, that all contributed with a position paper which was reviewed and revised before the workshop. Next to the submissions of the research consortium partners, there were also participants from research institutes in Spain, United Kingdom, Finland, and Japan. In preparation to the workshop, participants were requested to read all other submissions, and asked to prepare a clear position statement and questions that were likely to stimulate discussion.The goal of the workshop was to get more insight into how formal techniques can alleviate software evolution problems, and how they can lead to tools for the evolution of large and complex software systems that are more robust and more widely applicable without sacrificing efficiency. Preferably, the evolution-support tools should not be restricted to a particular phase of software evolution [BR00], but should be generally applicable throughout the entire application lifetime. The tools should also provide support for different aspects of software engineering, such as forward engineering, reverse engineering, re-engineering, and team engineering.In order to stimulate discussions, three general important questions were posed to the participants at the beginning of the workshop: Which aspects of software evolution need to be automated by tools? Where and how can formalisms help us to achieve tool support? How can we build formally-founded tools that are as general and flexible as possible? Note that the generality and flexibility of a tool involves many different aspects: --- independence of the programming language for which support should be provided; --- customisability by the user of the tool;--- applicability in or across different stages of software evolution; --- interoperability with other tools; --- scalability to large and complex software systems with multiple developers; --- usable for static (design-time) as well as dynamic (runtime) evolution; --- applicable to forward, reverse, and re-engineering; --- usable before, during, and after evolution; --- usable for facilitating, supporting, as well as analysing evolution; --- to deal with the what and why as well as the how of software evolution