Notes on the Parallels Between Biological and Software Evolution

This contribution analyzes parallels between software and biological evolution published in software engineering literature. Several papers suggest to the software engineering community that software and biological systems share some useful features of evolution. We compare the driving forces of the software evolution with biological evolution and highlight their different nature. We conclude that searching for parallels between biological and software evolution is a challenging task but at the same time there are limits, which may be hardly observed in the impure research field of software evolution