Software Evolution

Muhammad Asim
Ph# - +923066010010

 the gradual development of something.
Evolution is what happens
while you’re busy
making other plans.”
 The term evolution does not refer to changes that occur in an individual within its life
time .Instead it refers to the changes in the characteristics of population over the
course of generation.
 E.g. the Human Evolution Theory.

Organizations have huge investments in their software systems - they are critical
business assets.
To maintain the value of these assets to the business, they must be changed and
updated.
Companies prefer evolution on new developments.

 Evolution is what actually happens to the software
 There are two things in software evolution.
i. Software change.
ii. Software maintenance.

 Software change is unavoidable
 New requirements emerge when the software is used
 The business environment changes
 Errors must be repaired
 New equipment must be accommodated
 The performance or reliability may have to be improved.

 Predicting the number of changes requires and understanding of the
relationships between a system and its environment.
 Tightly coupled systems require changes whenever the environment is
changed.
 Factors influencing this relationship are
 Number and complexity of system interfaces.
 The business processes where the system is used.

 Software maintenance
 Architectural evolution
 Software re-engineering
 Software maintenance
 Changes are made in response to
changed requirements but the
fundamental software structure is stable
 Architectural transformation
 The architecture of the system is
modified.
 Software re-engineering
 No new functionality is added to the
system but it is restructured and
reorganised to facilitate future changes

 Maintenance does not normally involve major changes to the system’s architecture
 The system requirements are likely to change while the system is being developed
because the environment is changing. Therefore a delivered system won't meet its
requirements!
 Systems are tightly coupled with their environment. When a system is installed in an
environment it changes that environment and
therefore changes the system requirements.
 Systems MUST be maintained therefore if they
are to remain useful in an environment.

 Corrective
 Maintenance to repair software faults
 Adaptive
 Maintenance to adapt software to a different operating environment
 Perfective
 Maintenance to add to or modify the system’s functionality

Functionality
addition or
modification
(65%)
Fault repair
(17%)
Software
adaptation
(18%)

 Maintenance prediction is concerned with assessing which parts of the
system may cause problems and have high maintenance costs
 Change acceptance depends on the maintainability of the components affected by
the change;
 Implementing changes reduces its maintainability;
 Maintenance costs depend on the number of changes and costs of change depend
on maintainability.

 Change requests are requests for system changes from users, customers or
management
 In principle, all change requests should be carefully analysed as part of the
maintenance process and then implemented
 In practice, some change requests must be implemented urgently
 Fault repair
 Changes to the system’s environment
 Urgently required business changes

Systemrelease
planning
Change
implementation
System
release
Impact
analysis
Change
requests
Adaptive
maintenance
Corrective
maintenance
Perfective
maintenance

 Usually greater than development costs
 Increases as software is maintained. Maintenance corrupts the software structure so
makes further maintenance more difficult.
 Ageing software can have high support costs (e.g. old languages, compilers etc.)

 Team stability
 Maintenance costs are reduced if the same staff are involved with them for some time
 Contractual responsibility
 The developers of a system may have no contractual responsibility for maintenance so there
is no incentive to design for future change
 Staff skills
 Maintenance staff are often inexperienced and have limited domain knowledge
 Program age and structure
 As programs age, their structure is degraded and they become harder to understand and
change

 Rather than think of separate development and maintenance phases, evolutionary
software is software that is designed so that it can continuously evolve throughout its
lifetime

 Program evolution dynamics is the study of the processes of system change.
 After major empirical studies, Lehman and Belady proposed that there were a number
of ‘laws’ which applied to all systems as they evolved.
 There are sensible observations rather than laws. They are applicable to large
systems developed by large organisations. Perhaps less applicable in other cases.

Law Description
Continuing change A program that is used in a real-world environment
must necessarily change, or else become
progressively less useful in that environment.
Increasing complexity As an evolving program changes, its structure tends to
become more complex. Extra resources must be
devoted to preserving and simplifying the structure.
Large program evolution System attributes such as size, time between
releases, and the number of reported errors is
approximately invariant for each system release.
Organizational stability Over a program’s lifetime, its rate of development is
approximately constant and independent of the
resources devoted to system development.

Law Description
Conservation of familiarity Over the lifetime of a system, the incremental change
in each release is approximately constant.
Continuing growth The functionality offered by systems has to continually
increase to maintain user satisfaction.
Declining quality The quality of systems will decline unless they are
modified to reflect changes in their operational
environment.
Feedback system Evolution processes incorporate multiagent, multiloop
feedback systems and you have to treat them as
feedback systems to achieve significant product
improvement.

 There is a need to convert many legacy systems from a centralised architecture to a
client-server architecture
 Change drivers
 Hardware costs. Servers are cheaper than mainframes
 User interface expectations. Users expect graphical user interfaces
 Distributed access to systems. Users wish to access the system from different,
geographically separated, computers

 The more that is distributed from the server to the client, the higher the costs of
architectural evolution
 The simplest distribution model is UI distribution where only the user interface is
implemented on the server
 The most complex option is where the server simply provides data management and
application services are implemented on the client

 UI distribution takes advantage of the local processing power on PCs to implement a
graphical user interface
 Where there is a clear separation between the UI and the application then the legacy
system can be modified to distribute the UI
 Otherwise, screen management middleware can translate text interfaces to graphical
interfaces

 Organizations that rely on legacy systems must choose a strategy for evolving these
systems.
o Scrap the system completely and modify business processes so that it is no
longer required;
o Continue maintaining the system;
o Transform the system by re-engineering to improve its maintainability;
o Replace the system with a new system.
 The strategy chosen should depend on the system quality and its business value.

 Low quality, low business value
These systems should be scrapped.
 Low-quality, high-business value
These make an important business contribution but are expensive to maintain. Should
be re-engineered or replaced if a suitable system is available.
 High-quality, low-business value
Replace with COTS, scrap completely or maintain.
 High-quality, high business value
Continue in operation using normal system maintenance.

 Ideally, for distribution, there should be a clear separation between the user interface,
the system services and the system data management
 In practice, these are usually intermingled in older legacy systems

 Re-structuring or re-writing part or all of a legacy system without changing its
functionality.
 Applicable where some but not all sub-systems of a larger system require frequent
maintenance.
 Re-engineering involves adding effort to make them easier to maintain. The system
may be re-structured and re-documented.

 Reduced risk
 There is a high risk in new software development. There may be development
problems, staffing problems and specification problems.
 Reduced cost
 The cost of re-engineering is often significantly less than the costs of developing new
software.

 Source code translation
Convert code to a new language.
 Reverse engineering
Analyze the program to understand it;
 Program structure improvement
Restructure automatically for understandability;
 Program modularization
Reorganize the program structure;
 Data reengineering
Clean-up and restructure system data.

 Analyzing software with a view to understanding its design and specification
 May be part of a re-engineering process but may also be used to re-specify a system
for re-implementation
 Builds a program data base and generates information from this.
 Program understanding tools (browsers, cross-reference generators, etc.) may be
used in this process

 Reverse engineering often precedes re-engineering but is sometimes worthwhile in its
own right.
 The design and specification of a system may be reverse engineered so that they can
be an input to the requirements specification process for the system’s replacement.
 The design and specification may be reverse engineered to support program
maintenance

Software Evolution

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