Evolution of Software Engineering

 Topics covered
Evolution processes
– Change processes for software systems
Program evolution dynamics
– Understanding software evolution
– Software maintenance
– Making changes to operational software systems
Legacy system management
– Making decisions about software change
Software change is inevitable
– New requirements emerge when the software is used;
– The business environment changes;
– Errors must be repaired;
– New computers and equipment is added to the system;
– The performance or reliability of the system may have to be improved.
A key problem for all organizations is implementing and managing change to
their existing software systems.
Importance of Evolution
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.
The majority of the software budget in large companies is devoted to changing and
evolving existing software rather than developing new software.

A spiral model of development and evolution

 Evolution and servicing

Evolution process

Evolution
The stage in a software system’s life cycle where it is in operational use and is evolving
as new requirements are proposed and implemented in the system.

Servicing
At this stage, the software remains useful but the only changes made are those required to
keep it operational i.e. bug fixes and changes to reflect changes in the software’s
environment. No new functionality is added.

Phase-out
The software may still be used but no further changes are made to it.
Evolution process

Software evolution processes depend on

– The type of software being maintained;

– The development processes used;

– The skills and experience of the people involved.

Should be linked with components that are affected by the change, thus allowing the
cost and impact of the change to be estimated.
Change identification and evolution continues throughout the system lifetime.

Change identification and evolution processes

The software evolution process

Change implementation
Change implementation
• Iteration of the development process where the revisions to the system are designed,
implemented and tested.
• A critical difference is that the first stage of change implementation may involve
program understanding, especially if the original system developers are not
responsible for the change implementation.
• During the program understanding phase, you have to understand how the
program is structured, how it delivers functionality and how the proposed change
might affect the program.
Urgent change request
Urgent changes may have to be implemented without going through all stages of the
software engineering process
– If a serious system fault has to be repaired to allow normal
operation to continue;
– If changes to the system’s environment (e.g. an OS upgrade) have unexpected
effects;
– If there are business changes that require a very rapid response (e.g. the
release of a competing product).
The Emergency Repair Process

Agile Methods and Evolution

Agile methods are based on incremental development so the transition from development to
evolution is a seamless one.
– Evolution is simply a continuation of the development process based on
frequent system releases.
Automated regression testing is particularly valuable when changes are made to a
system.
Changes may be expressed as additional user stories.
Hand Over problem
Where the development team have used an agile approach but the evolution team is
unfamiliar with agile methods and prefer a plan-based approach.
– The evolution team may expect detailed documentation to support evolution
and this is not produced in agile processes.
Where a plan-based approach has been used for development but the evolution
team prefer to use agile methods.
– The evolution team may have to start from scratch developing
automated tests and the code in the system may not have been
refactored and simplified as is expected in agile development.

Program Evolution Dynamics

• Program evolution dynamics is the study of the processes of system change.
• After several 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 organizations.
– It is not clear if these are applicable to other types of software system.
Change is Inevitable: 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 changed if they are to remain useful in an environment.
Lehman ’slaw
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 Program evolution is a self-regulating
process. System attributes such as size, time
between releases, and the number of
reported errors is approximately invariant
for each system release.
Law
Description
Organizational stability Over a program’s lifetime, its rate of
development is approximately constant and
independent of the resources devoted to
system development.

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.
 Applicability of Lehman ’slaw
Lehman’s laws seem to be generally applicable to large, tailored systems developed by large
organizations.
– Confirmed in early 2000’s by work by Lehman on the FEAST project.

It is not clear how they should be modified for

– Shrink-wrapped software products;

– Systems that incorporate a significant number of COTS components;

– Small organizations;
– Medium sized systems.
KEY POINTS
Software development and evolution can be thought of as an integrated, iterative process that can
be represented using a spiral model.
For custom systems, the costs of software maintenance usually exceed the software
development costs.
The process of software evolution is driven by requests for changes and includes change
impact analysis, release planning and change implementation.
Lehman’s laws, such as the notion that change is continuous, describe a number of insights
derived from long-term studies of system evolution.
Software maintenance
Modifying a program after it has been put into use.
The term is mostly used for changing custom software. Generic software products are
said to evolve to create new versions.
Maintenance does not normally involve major changes to the system’s architecture.
Changes are implemented by modifying existing components and adding new components
to the system.
Tyes of Maintenance
Maintenance to repair software faults

Changing a system to correct deficiencies in the way meets its Requirements.

Maintenance to adapt software to a different operating environment

Changing a system so that it operates in a different environment (computer, OS, etc.) from its

initial implementation.
Maintenance to add to or modify the system’s functionality
Modifying the system to satisfy new requirements.

Figure of bellow Maintenance effort distribution

Maintenance costs
• Usually greater than development costs (2* to 100*
depending on the application).

• Affected by both technical and non-technical factors.

• 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.).
 Figure Development and maintenance costs

Maintenance costs factors

• 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.
Maintenance prediction
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 degrades the system and reduces its
maintainability;
– Maintenance costs depend on the number of changes and costs of change depend

on maintainability.

Maintenance prediction
Change prediction

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;
– Number of inherently volatile system requirements;
– The business processes where the system is used.
Complexity metrics
Predictions of maintainability can be made by assessing the
complexity of system components.
Studies have shown that most maintenance effort is spent on a relatively small number of
system components.
• Complexity depends on
– Complexity of control structures;
– Complexity of data structures;
– Object, method (procedure) and module size.
Process metrics
Process metrics may be used to assess maintainability
– Number of requests for corrective maintenance;
– Average time required for impact analysis;
– Average time taken to implement a change request;
– Number of outstanding change requests.
If any or all of these is increasing, this may indicate a decline in
maintainability.
System re-engineering
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.

Advantages of reengineering
 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.
The reengineering processes

Reengineering process activities

• Source code translation
– Convert code to a new language.
• Reverse engineering
– Analyse 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.

Reengineering approaches
Reengineering cost factors
• The quality of the software to be reengineered.
• The tool support available for reengineering.
• The extent of the data conversion which is required.
• The availability of expert staff for
reengineering.
– This can be a problem with old systems based on technology that is no
longer widely used.

Preventative maintenance by refactoring

• Refactoring is the process of making improvements to a program to slow down
degradation through change.

• You can think of refactoring as ‘preventative

maintenance’ that reduces the problems of future change.
• Refactoring involves modifying a program to improve its structure, reduce its
complexity or make it easier to understand.
• When you refactor a program, you should not add functionality but
rather concentrate on program improvement.
Refactoring and reengineering
Re-engineering takes place after a system has been maintained for some time and
maintenance costs are increasing. You use automated tools to process and re-
engineer a legacy system to create a new system that is more maintainable.
Refactoring is a continuous process of improvement throughout the development and
evolution process. It is intended to avoid the structure and code degradation that increases
the costs and difficulties of maintaining a system.
‘Bad smells’ in program code

Duplicate code
– The same or very similar code may be included at different places in a
program. This can be removed and implemented as a single method or
function that is called as required.

Long methods
– If a method is too long, it should be redesigned as a number of shorter
methods.

Switch (case) statements

– These often involve duplication, where the switch depends on the type of a
value. The switch statements may be scattered around a program. In object-
oriented languages, you can often use polymorphism to achieve the same
thing.

‘Bad smells’ in program code

Data clumping
– Data clumps occur when the same group of data items (fields in classes,
parameters in methods) re-occur in several places in a program. These can
often be replaced with an object that encapsulates all of the data.
Speculative generality
– This occurs when developers include generality in a program in case it is
required in the future. This can often simply be removed.
Legacy system management
Organizations that rely on legacy systems must choose a

strategy for evolving these systems

– Scrap the system completely and modify business processes so that it is no
longer required;
– Continue maintaining the system;
– Transform the system by re-engineering to improve its maintainability;
– Replace the system with a new system.

The strategy chosen should depend on the system quality and its business value.
An example of a legacy system assessment

Legacy system categories: 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.
Key points: There are 3 types of software maintenance, namely bug fixing, modifying
software to work in a new environment, and implementing new or changed requirements.
• Software re-engineering is concerned with re-structuring and re-documenting
software to make it easier to understand and change.
• Refactoring, making program changes that preserve functionality, is
a form of preventative maintenance.
• The business value of a legacy system and the quality of the application should be
assessed to help decide if a system should be replaced, transformed or maintained.