Introduction to the special issue on software maintenance and evolution research

Abstract

The past decade has seen tremendous changes in the landscape of software engineering activities in industry and of software engineering research topics in academia. Software engineering activities used to be mostly “hidden” behind the closed doors of software industries. In the 1990’s, the emergence of the open-source development model and movement revolutionized software development but also software engineering research. Nowadays, open-source software (OSS) development has become a major source of new libraries and programs, and more and more industries either use OSS or even release OSS themselves. Even large corporations, in which trade secrets were the norm, now consider releasing their source code as open-source, for example Microsoft with its Windows operating system (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/ 04/open-source-windows-is-definitely-possible-but-dont-hold-your-breath/). The open-source revolution gave rise to the development of many collaborative development tools, including distributed version control systems (such as Git and its popular Web platforms GitHub and BitBucket), issue trackers (such as Bugzilla), and continuous integration tools (such as Travis). These tools now depend on one another, leading to the creation of so-called software ecosystems, sets of programs and libraries relying on one another. These ecosystems further feed the dependence on, and development of, OSS.