Proceedings of the International Workshop on Continuous Software Evolution and Delivery

Abstract

Welcome to the 1st International Workshop on Continuous Software Evolution and Delivery (CSED), Austin, TX, USA 14th and 15th of May as part of ICSE 2016. Today, software development is conducted in increasingly turbulent business environments. Typically, fast-changing and unpredictable markets, complex and changing customer requirements, pressures of shorter time-to-market, and rapidly advancing information technologies are characteristics found in most software development projects. To address this situation, agile practices advocating flexibility, efficiency and speed are seen as increasingly attractive by software development companies. While many software development companies have indeed succeeded in adopting agile practices in parts of their organization, the focus for many organizations is predominantly at the team level. The other functions in the organization of many companies, including customer relations, product management, R&D management and software release, still work in traditional slow cycles, measured in months and years. However, the first examples of companies, for instance in the Web 2.0 industry, now start to appear that operate their entire R&D cycle in a rapid continuous fashion. For instance, Amazon releases new software every 11 seconds and carefully measures the value that this software provides to customers. Rapid continuous software evolution and delivery refers to the organizational capability to evolve and deliver software in fast parallel cycles, typically hours, days or very small numbers of weeks. This includes determining new functionality to build, prioritizing the most important functionality, evolving and refactoring the architecture, developing the functionality, validating it, releasing it to customers and collecting feedback from the customers to inform the next cycle of development. The capability to perform all these activities in days or a few weeks requires significant changes in the entire software engineering and innovation process, including parallelizing development and testing activities, empowering cross-functional teams and release engineers to allow for rapid decision making and lightweight coordination across teams. This evolution also requires significant technical advances in the engineering infrastructure, including continuous integration and deployment, collection of post-deployment product usage data, and support for automatically running live experiments to evaluate different system alternatives, e.g., A/B testing. As reaching the goal of continuous software innovation and delivery is a holistic endeavor, it cannot be addressed only by automating the release engineering pipeline, but requires changes across the whole development cycle, both before (as far back as the requirements) and after release. Approaches for live monitoring and experimentation must be available and the results must be appropriately fed back into the artifacts of the different phases that went into a release which are affected by the results of the live experimentation. This is crucial since changing the release cycle of large systems is an invasive activity, and there are no data points yet about the long-term viability and deficiencies of continuous software innovation delivery. Exchanges of success and horror stories, experiences and best practices amongst practitioners and developers are essential for start-ups to obtain a head-start and for multinationals to keep on innovating their continuous software evolution and delivery. Consequently, the CSED workshop aims to bring the research and practitioner communities of the aforementioned areas together to exchange challenges, ideas, experiences and solutions to bring software evolution and delivery a step further towards being a holistic and continuous process.