Research Relevance
The research may substantially change the way in which software investments are protected and saved. Spending Less to Get More: Exploring Effective Ways for Software Change and Evolution Software technologies are omnipresent in our lives today; few industries don't rely on them in one way or another. Most develop, subcontract, and/or acquire significant amounts of software every year. But just as the technology is ubiquitous, so too is change: Software systems must be flexible, dynamic and able to evolve along with the needs of consumers; they must be built in a way that makes cost-effective change possible. This is a challenge since the systems tend to be large and highly complex. In addition, the process of change requires a lot of peoples input and it is risky, since unplanned and undisciplined changes in any software system of realistic size risk degrading the quality of the software, and producing unwanted or unexpected side effects. Finding ways to overcome these challenges is the goal of Canada Research Chair Giuliano Antoniol, whose philosophy is that software changes should be carefully managed and intimately related to high-level software artifacts (often a complete software program); in fact, he believes that change should spring from these artifacts in a natural way. We are developing sophisticated tools for the effective planning, managing, and implementing of software changes, based on specification and design models. Our approach is helping to avoid software quality degradation through each new change, while at the same time ensuring a cost-effective evolutionary process.
