Symbiosis and Software Evolvability

Abstract

As software systems become more pervasive and complex and - at the same time - expensive and difficult to maintain, the R&D community has turned to biological systems to find mechanisms that support system integrity and robustness. In both biology and software development, evolvability has become a research area in its own right. To improve software evolvability, many researchers have studied biological system properties, such as self-organization, modularity, and gene duplication. Our research focuses instead on software ecosystems and symbiosis as a business strategy for multivendor software systems.