Design of Incremental Change
Incremental change (IC) is at the core of many software engineering processes, including maintenance, iterative development, iterative enhancement, agile development, software evolution, and so forth. Design of IC assesses IC alternatives and helps prevent the software decay. This research addresses design of IC in a novel way through combination of classical static program analysis and information retrieval. This proposal builds on and brings together existing results from program analysis, information retrieval, classical object oriented design, and case studies of IC in order to explore techniques for IC design. It involves validation of the proposed techniques through case studies on the evolution of a large and widely-used academic bioinformatics software system. The research will contribute to the Science of Design by producing design techniques for proposed IC of existing software and by obtaining new insights into the IC design. It will contribute directly to the improvement of software quality and to the reduction of software maintenance costs. It will build a software engineering foundation for the emerging agile development processes.
