Software Evolution: The Need for Empirical Evidence. Antoniol, G., Gu�h�neuc, Y., Merlo, E., & Sahraoui, H. In Proceedings of the 1<sup>st</sup> ICSM workshop on Empirical Studies in Reverse Engineering (WESRE), pages N/A, September, 2005. IEEE CS Press. 2 pages.
Software Evolution: The Need for Empirical Evidence [pdf]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
An intrinsic property of software is its malleability, the fact that it may change and evolve. Software evolution is costly, because software systems tend to be highly complex and large. They are highly human intensive and risky, because unplanned and undisciplined changes in any software system of realistic size risk degrading software quality and may produce unwanted and unexpected side effects. As a software system is enhanced, modified, and adapted to new requirements, its code becomes increasingly complex, often drifting away from its original design. The current state-of-the-art in software evolution offers only short-term solutions to software change and evolution focused on software maintenance and defect repair, in which only the source code evolves, while the architecture, design, and—more generally—the documentation are not updated.

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