Research Directions In Software Technology

The primary purpose of this book is to provide an understandable but nontrivial description by active research workers of concepts and research issues in principal subareas of software technology. It should be useful to both the specialist and the technical layman as a source of factual information about research issues and can serve as a starting point for discussions of what to do next. We hope it will make practitioners aware of the practical contributions of research, make researchers aware of the needs of technology, and serve to stimulate greater collaboration between practitioners and research workers. An even more ambitious objective is to encourage dialogue among research workers in different areas (such as computer architecture, programming languages and data base management) so that the basis for an integrated approach to computer systems can be established. Last but not least, this study may be useful to funding agencies and other policy-making bodies in making policy decisions concerning future support of research.

Software product lines are emerging as a critical new paradigm for software development. Product lines are enabling organizations to achieve impressive time-to-market gains and cost reductions. With the increasing number of product lines and product-line researchers and practitioners, the time is right for a comprehensive examination of the issues surrounding the software product line approach. The Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University is proud to sponsor the first conference on this important subject. This book comprises the proceedings of the First Software Product Line Conference (SPLC1), held August 28-31, 2000, in Denver, Colorado, USA. The twenty-seven papers of the conference technical program present research results and experience reports that cover all aspects of software product lines. Topics include business issues, enabling technologies, organizational issues, and life-cycle issues. Emphasis is placed on experiences in the development and fielding of product lines of complex systems, especially those that expose problems in the design, development, or evolution of software product lines. The book will be essential reading for researchers and practitioners alike.

Large and growing opportunity costs are resulting from the inability to produce sophisticated, reliable software in a timely manner. Software engineering presents stubborn problems, but in this book, a group of experts suggest several constructive directions for research. Together, they support the need for greater interaction between researchers and practitioners and more aggressive efforts to share and reuse software engineering knowledge.

Metrics for software development are usually employed ad-hoc and without clear directions for interpreting the numbers and acting on them. Almost every other engineering discipline has clear guidelines for measuring processes and products and making decisions based on quantified evidence. This practical book describes how to integrate processes and metrics to ensure easier and more effective enterprise software development. It crosses the divide between theory and practice and also discusses why essential processes so often fail to deliver quality industrial software. Enterprise Software Development introduces the techniques for building, applying and interpreting metrics for the workflows across the software development life cycle phases of inception, elaboration, construction and transition. It is a must read for software engineering practitioners (architects, application developers, designers and project managers), academics, and students and apprentices of software engineering.

This handbook provides a unique and in-depth survey of the current state-of-the-art in software engineering, covering its major topics, the conceptual genealogy of each subfield, and discussing future research directions. Subjects include foundational areas of software engineering (e.g. software processes, requirements engineering, software architecture, software testing, formal methods, software maintenance) as well as emerging areas (e.g., self-adaptive systems, software engineering in the cloud, coordination technology). Each chapter includes an introduction to central concepts and principles, a guided tour of seminal papers and key contributions, and promising future research directions. The authors of the individual chapters are all acknowledged experts in their field and include many who have pioneered the techniques and technologies discussed. Readers will find an authoritative and concise review of each subject, and will also learn how software engineering technologies have evolved and are likely to develop in the years to come. This book will be especially useful for researchers who are new to software engineering, and for practitioners seeking to enhance their skills and knowledge.

Agile software development has become an umbrella term for a number of changes in how software developers plan and coordinate their work, how they communicate with customers and external stakeholders, and how software development is organized in small, medium, and large companies, from the telecom and healthcare sectors to games and interactive media. Still, after a decade of research, agile software development is the source of continued debate due to its multifaceted nature and insufficient synthesis of research results. Dingsøyr, Dybå, and Moe now present a comprehensive snapshot of the knowledge gained over many years of research by those working closely with or in the industry. It shows the current state of research on agile software development through an introduction and ten invited contributions on the main research fields, each written by renowned experts. These chapters cover three main issues: foundations and background of agile development, agile methods in practice, and principal challenges and new frontiers. They show the important results in each subfield, and in addition they explain what these results mean to practitioners as well as for future research in the field. The book is aimed at reflective practitioners and researchers alike, and it also can serve as the basis for graduate courses at universities.