Hot topics in Evolutionary Software Development

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Hot topics in Evolutionary Software Development
National Research Council Canada Institute
for Information Technology
Conseil national de recherches Canada Institut
de technologie de linformation

• W. Morven Gentleman
• Institute for Information Technology
• Ottawa, ON
• Morven.Gentleman_at_NRC.CA

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What is Evolutionary Software Development?

• Successful software must evolve
• To address new requirements
• To take advantage of new technology
• To meet new expectations.
• Conventionally each update is treated as an
  isolated project with fixed specifications

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What is Evolutionary Software Development?

• Evolutionary software development recognizes that
  planning for the whole lifetime, with all its
  changes, can reduce life cycle costs and
  accelerate delivery of new functionality

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1. Choices for Process Software Architecture

• What architectures preserve investment?
• What architectures facilitate evolution?
• What architectures inhibit evolution?
• What processes avoid redundancy?
• What processes facilitate evolution?
• What processes inhibit evolution?
• How would you substantiate these claims?

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2. Incremental Delivery

• Is the time scale nightly build?
• Is the time scale product release?
• How do you decide what to defer?
• How does deferred functionality appear?
• What provision is made for upgrades?

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3. Concurrent Development of Successive Releases

• When to initiate development on new release?
• Same team or different teams?
• How to (retro)fit changes to multiple releases?
• How to represent ideas for future releases?

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4. Coping with Platform Evolution

• Both hardware and software platforms?
• Anticipated and unexpected evolution?
• Exploit generated code and other indirection?
• Other tools?

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5. Coping withProcess Change

• Change to mandated process for use?
• If process changes, how must history change?
• Can history with old process aid new process?

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6. Data Structure Format Evolution

• Changes in
• Input?
• Output?
• Database?
• Control actions?
• Conversion tools?

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7. Interoperability

• Interoperability supported at all levels
• coexistence with other software?
• backward and forward compatibility?
• explicit complementary competitive products?
• Recognize that software used in conjunction with
  this software evolves too?

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8. Scaffolding

• (Ancillary software used to build products)
• What scaffolding is unique to a specific release?
• What scaffolding need be reused for each release?
• Implications for building scaffolding?

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9. Configuration Management

• Developers geographically distributed?
• Developers organizationally distributed?
• Product families?
• Nontextual entities?
• Configuration management at customer sites?

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10. Automated Upgrading

• Improve registry concept and implementation?
• Better configuration probing?
• Identifying and updating saved data?
• Verification of successful installation?
• Uninstall and other failure handling?
• Generating feedback to developers?

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11. Testing

• What regression testing is appropriate?
• Can integration testing be simplified?
• What inter-release consistency testing is needed?
• How to do installation testing?
• Changes induce how much integrity testing?

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12. Incremental Quality Assurance

• How to reuse walkthroughs?
• How to reuse reviews?
• How to beta-test successive releases?
• How to achieve incrementality?

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13. Field Support for Several Releases
Simultaneously

• Detection of which release automatic?
• Automatically identify relevant data and snapshot
  it?
• Choice of updates automatically?
• Adequate recording in registry?

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14. Aids for Retraining Users

• Semi-automation for design and production of
  training tutorials?
• Semi-automation for design and production of
  interactive exercises?
• Semi-automation for design and production of
  integrated wizards?

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15. Project Metric Tracking

• Product metrics
• What metrics are required?
• How to collect data?
• How to interpret results?
• Process metrics
• What metrics are required?
• How to collect data?
• How to interpret results?

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16. Implications for Procurement

• Balancing long-term relationships
• Cost of maintaining team?
• Challenge of sustaining interest?
• Commitment to continued activity?
• Opportunities for reassessment?
• Support for long-term Prime/Sub relationships?
• Alternatives for progress payments?
• How to change the culture Change to what?

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Conclusions

• Plentiful opportunities for research
• Gaining acceptance is the principal challenge
• Technical problems must be solved, but ultimate
  issues are not technical