Basic Information

Overview

This course will explore issues related to software evolution: why it is difficult, and how we can cope with this difficulty. Specifically, the course will look at advanced tools and techniques proposed by the research community to ease, simplify, and automate software evolution, with a special focus on three major themes: software modularity, reverse engineering, and fault detection. An overarching theme underlying most of the course will be the question of validity in software engineering research and the methodologies used to achieve it.

• An undergraduate software engineering course;
• Experience developing software as part of a team using software engineering practices (e.g., configuration management);
• Up-to-date knowledge of at least one "industrial" programming language (e.g., Java, C++);
• Familiarity with issues in programming languages, object-oriented languages, and object-oriented design;
• A good command of written and spoken English (the course is discussion-based)

Reference Material

The practical component of the course will consist of a two-part project. In the first part, you will analyze an existing software system to assess its evolvability in the context of a specific enhancement. In the second part, you will design and implement a software evolution tool or technique, and use the system analyzed in the first part to validate your work. Your results and experiences will be presented to the class during a workshop.

The grading scheme for the course is as follows (subject to change):

Project 1: Software Assessment		20%
Project 2: Software Evolution Technique		40%
Discussion		15%
Final exam:		15%
Class participation		10%

Intangibles may be considered in assigning grades.

Academic Integrity

Date	Topic	Reading
Wed 3 Sep	Introduction to Software Evolution	[1] T. Mens. Introduction and Roadmap: History and Challenges of Software Evolution. Textbook Chapter 1. [2] D.L. Parnas. Software Aging. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Software Engineering, 1994.
Mon 8 Sep	Modularity	[3] D.L. Parnas. Some Software Engineering Principles. Infotech State of the Art Report on Structured Analysis and Design, Infotech International, 1978. [4] D.L. Parnas. D.L. Parnas. On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules. Communications of the ACM, 15(12), 1972. [5]* D. Ancona, G. Lagorio, E. Zucca. Jam - A Smooth Extension of Java with Mixins. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, 2000.
Wed 10 Sep	Empirical Studies of Software Evolution	[6] J. Fernandez-Ramil et al. Empirical Studies of Open Source Evolution. Textbook Chapter 11. [7]* S.G. Eick, T.L. Graves, A.F. Karr, J.S. Marron, and A. Mockus. Does code decay? assessing the evidence from change management data. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 27(1), 2001.
Mon 15 Sep	Clone Detection and Analysis	[8] R. Koschke. Identifying and Removing Software Clones. Textbook Chapter 2.
Wed 17 Sep	Clone Management (A)	[9] E. Duala-Ekoko and M.P. Robillard. Tracking Code Clones in Evolving Software. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 158-167, May 2007.
Mon 22 Sep	Aspect-Oriented Programming (R)	[10] T. Elrad et al. Introduction to AOP. Communications of the ACM, 44(10), 2001. [11] K. Mens and T. Tourwé. Evolution Issues in Aspect-Oriented Programming. Textbook Chapter 9.
Wed 24 Sep	Static and Dynamic Analysis for Software Engineering	[12] F. Tip. A survey of program slicing techniques. Journal of programming languages, 3:121-189, 1995. [Chapters 1-3] [13] T. Reps et al. The use of program profiling for software maintenance with applications to the year 2000 problem. Software Engineering Notes 22(6):432-449, 1997.
Mon 29 Sep	Fault Detection (O)	[14] Z. Li and Y. Zhou. PRMiner: Automatically Extracting Implicit Programming Rules and Detecting Violations in Large Software Code. Software Engineering Notes 30(5):306-315, 2005.
Wed 1 Oct	Fault Detection (C)	[15] S. Hangal and M.S. Lam. Tracking down software bugs using automatic anomaly detection. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2002.
Mon 6 Oct	Validation in Software Engineering Research	[16] D.E. Perry et al.. Empirical Studies of Software Engineering: A Roadmap. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering (The Future of Software Engineering), 2000.
Wed 8 Oct	Project Meetings
Mon 13 Oct	No class (Thanksgiving)
Wed 15 Oct	Mining Software Repositories	[17] Zimmermann et al. Predicting Bugs from History. Textbook Chapter 4.
Mon 20 Oct	Software Visualization (O)	[18] D'Ambros et al., Analyzing Software Repositories to Understand Software Evolution. Textbook Chapter 3.
Wed 22 Oct	Programming Environments	[19] A. Zeller. The Future of Programming Environments: Integration, Synergy, and Assistance. In Proceedings of the Future of Software Engineering at the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2007.
Mon 27 Oct	Recommendation Systems (C)	[20] M.P. Robillard. Topology Analysis of Software Dependencies. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 17(4):Article 18, August 2008
Wed 29 Oct	Recommendation Systems (O)	[21] R.T. Holmes and G.C. Murphy. Using structural context to recommend source code examples. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2005.
Mon 3 Nov	Feature Location (R)	[22] Liu et al. Feature location via information retrieval based filtering of a single scenario execution trace. In Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2007.
Wed 5 Nov	Object-Oriented Reengineering (A)	[23] S. Demeyer. Object-Oriented Reengineering. Textbook Chapter 5.
Mon 10 Nov	Evolution and Testing	[24] Moonen et al. On the Interplay Between Software Testing and Evolution and its Effect on Program Comprehension. Textbook Chapter 8.
Wed 12 Nov	No class (Projects)
Mon 17 Nov	Refactoring (C)	[25] Dig and Johnson. How do APIs Evolve? A Story of Refactoring. Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice. 18(2):83-107, 2006.
Wed 19 Nov	API Evolution (R)	[26] B. Dagenais and M.P. Robillard. Recommending Adaptive Changes for Framework Evolution. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 481-490, May 2008.
Mon 24 Nov	Migration of Legacy Systems (A)	[27] Hainaut et al. Migration of Legacy Information Systems. Textbook Chapter 6.
Wed 26 Nov	Architecture Evolution (R)	[28] Barais et al. Software Architecture Evolution. Textbook Chapter 10.
Mon 1 Dec	Workshop
Wed 2 Dec	Workshop

Deadlines

Links and Documents