Challenges in Software Evolution

Today’s information technology society increasingly relies on software at all levels. Nevertheless, software quality generally continues to fall short of expectations, and software systems continue to suffer from symptoms of aging as they are adapted to changing requirements and environments. The only way to overcome or avoid the negative effects of software aging is by placing change and evolution in the center of the software development process. In this article we describe what we believe to be some of the most important research challenges in software evolution. The goal of this document is to provide novel research directions in the software evolution domain

Designing visual analytics systems for disease spread and evolution: VAST 2010 mini challenge 2 and 3 award: Good overall design and analysis

Using two of the VAST 2010 mini challenges as a case study, we report on the design decisions and software development process used to create visual analytics software for understanding disease spread and mutation. The software we developed and the analysis conducted attempted to help us understand (a) how a fictitious disease may have spread between selected cities around the globe; and (b) how genetic sequences taken from infected patients may be used to chart the evolution of the disease and changes in its severity, drug resistance and other characteristics

System and Software Requirements in Relation to Observability and Explainability

Software maintenance and evolution are crucial aspects of software development. In today's world, observability and explainability are becoming essential requirements for software systems. This research paper investigates the relationship between software maintenance and evolution with observability and explainability. The paper explores the importance of observability and explainability in software systems and how they impact the maintenance and evolution of software systems. The research paper presents various techniques and tools for achieving observability and explainability in software systems. The paper also highlights the challenges and future research directions in the field of software maintenance and evolution in relation to observability and explainability

Rationale Management Challenges in Requirements Engineering

Rationale and rationale management have been playing an increasingly prominent role in software system development mainly due to the knowledge demand during system evaluation, maintenance, and evolution, especially for large and complex systems. The rationale management for requirements engineering, as a commencing and critical phase in software development life cycle, is still under-exploited. In this paper, we first survey briefly the state-of-the-art on rationale employment and applications in requirements engineering. Secondly, we identify the challenges in integrating rationale management in requirements engineering activities in order to promote further investigations and define a research agenda on rationale management in requirements engineering.

Enhancing Security in the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)

The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) cares for all steps to have a sound implementation of projects. So many projects are tested to be delivering but with the test of time, security challenges arise. In cases where projects have executed required tasks for decades, software evolution expands the scope and security requirements increase beyond what the developer initially cared for. This work explores the critical security incorporations that ensure a better security of software so that at any level of evolution, security challenges do not arise. There is always focus on security of design but this work is on information security in the software development life cycle to avoid tampering, endeavour integrity and authentication of information