George Santayana's statement, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," is only half true. The past also includes successful histories. If you haven't been made aware of them, you're often condemned not to repeat their successes.In a rapidly expanding field such as software engineering, this happens a lot. Extensive studies of many software projects such as the Standish Reports offer convincing evidence that many projects fail to repeat past successes.This paper tries to identify at least some of the major past software experiences that were well worth repeating, and some that were not. It also tries to identify underlying phenomena influencing the evolution of software engineering practices that have at least helped the author appreciate how our field has gotten to where it has been and where it is.A counterpart Santayana-like statement about the past and future might say, "In an era of rapid change, those who repeat the past are condemned to a bleak future." (Think about the dinosaurs, and think carefully about software engineering maturity models that emphasize repeatability.)This paper also tries to identify some of the major sources of change that will affect software engineering practices in the next couple of decades, and identifies some strategies for assessing and adapting to these sources of change. It also makes some first steps towards distinguishing relatively timeless software engineering principles that are risky not to repeat, and conditions of change under which aging practices will become increasingly risky to repeat.

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A view of 20th and 21st century software engineering

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a feature‐based characterization of version control systems (VCSs), providing an overview about the state‐of‐the‐art of versioning systems dedicated to modeling artifacts.Design/methodology/approach – Based on a literature study of existing approaches, a description of the features of versioning systems is established. Special focus is set on three‐way merging which is an integral component of optimistic versioning. This characterization is employed on current model versioning systems, which allows the derivation of challenges in this research area.Findings – The results of the evaluation show that several challenges need to be addressed in future developments of VCSs and merging tools in order to allow the parallel development of model artifacts.Practical implications – Making model‐driven engineering (MDE) a success requires supporting the parallel development of model artifacts as is done nowadays for text‐based artifacts. Therefore, model versioning ca...

A survey on model versioning approaches

Many areas of computer science are concerned with some form of variation in software---from managing changes to software over time to supporting families of related artifacts. We present the choice calculus, a fundamental representation for software variation that can serve as a common language of discourse for variation research, filling a role similar to the lambda calculus in programming language research. We also develop an associated theory of software variation, including sound transformations of variation artifacts, the definition of strategic normal forms, and a design theory for variation structures, which will support the development of better algorithms and tools.

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The Choice Calculus: A Representation for Software Variation

In an environment of constant change and variation driven by competition and innovation, a software service can rarely remain stable. Being able to manage and control the evolution of services is therefore an important goal for the Service-Oriented paradigm. This work extends existing and widely adopted theories from software engineering, programming languages, service-oriented computing, and other related fields to provide the fundamental ingredients required to guarantee that spurious results and inconsistencies that may occur due to uncontrolled service changes are avoided. The paper provides a unifying theoretical framework for controlling the evolution of services that deals with structural, behavioral, and QoS level-induced service changes in a type-safe manner, ensuring correct versioning transitions so that previous clients can use a versioned service in a consistent manner.

On the Evolution of Services

Recent research results suggest a need for code clone management. In this paper, we introduce JSync, a novel clone management tool. JSync provides two main functions to support developers in being aware of the clone relation among code fragments as software systems evolve and in making consistent changes as they create or modify cloned code. JSync represents source code and clones as (sub)trees in Abstract Syntax Trees, measures code similarity based on structural characteristic vectors, and describes code changes as tree editing scripts. The key techniques of JSync include the algorithms to compute tree editing scripts, to detect and update code clones and their groups, to analyze the changes of cloned code to validate their consistency, and to recommend relevant clone synchronization and merging. Our empirical study on several real-world systems shows that JSync is efficient and accurate in clone detection and updating, and provides the correct detection of the defects resulting from inconsistent changes to clones and the correct recommendations for change propagation across cloned code.

Clone Management for Evolving Software

Software Configuration Management (SCM) is an important discipline in professional software development and maintenance. The importance of SCM has increased as programs have become larger, more long lasting, and more mission and life critical. This article discusses the evolution of SCM technology from the early days of software development to the present, with a particular emphasis on the impact that university and industrial research has had along the way. Based on an analysis of the publication history and evolution in functionality of the available SCM systems, we trace the critical ideas in the field from their early inception to their eventual maturation in commercially and freely available SCM systems. In doing so, this article creates a detailed record of the critical value of SCM research and illustrates how research results have shaped the functionality of today's SCM systems.

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Impact of software engineering research on the practice of software configuration management

Software Configuration Management (SCM) is an important discipline in professional software development and maintenance. The importance of SCM has increased as programs have become larger and more complex and mission/life-critical. This paper discusses the evolution of SCM technology from the early days of software development to present and the impact university and industrial research has had along the way. It also includes a survey of the industrial state-of-the-practice and research directions.The paper published here is not intended to be a definitive assessment. Rather, our intention is to solicit comments and corrections from the community to help refine the work. If you would like to provide further information, please contact the first author. A longer version of this report can be found at http://wwwadele.imag.fr/SCMImpact.pdf.

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Impact of the research community on the field of software configuration management: summary of an impact project report

Software configuration management (SCM) is an important discipline in professional software development and maintenance. The importance of SCM has increased as programs have become larger, more complex, and more mission/life-critical. This paper presents a brief summary of a full report that discusses the evolution of SCM technology from the early days of software development to present, and the specific impact university and industrial research has had along the way.

Darcy Wiborg-Weber

Papers

Impact of software engineering research on the practice of software configuration management

Impact of the research community on the field of software configuration management: summary of an impact project report

Impact of the research community for the field of software configuration management