Evolving software systems : emerging trends and challenges

Software evolution research is a thriving area of software engineering research. Recent years have seen a growing interest in variety of evolution topics, as witnessed by the growing number of publications dedicated to the subject. Without attempting to be complete, in this talk we provide an overview of emerging trends in software evolution research, such as extension of the traditional boundaries of software, growing attention for social and socio-technical aspects of software development processes, and interdisciplinary research applying research techniques from other research areas to study software evolution, and software evolution research techniques to other research areas. As a large body of software evolution research is empirical in nature, we are confronted by important challenges pertaining to reproducibility of the research, and its generalizability