Technological Evolution in Software Engineering

In all software development processes, the software must evolve in response to its environment or user needs to maintain satisfactory performance. If software doesn’t support change, it gradually becomes useless. With many organizations today, being software-centric organizations, this has huge implications for their business: evolve your software, or risk your software becoming gradually useless, and therefore, your entire business. Technology Evolution is a highly relevant subject, Intel’s business model for the last 50 years, has been that of Moore’s Law, a hardware centric Technology Evolution model. As a Software Engineer at Intel, our business group faces a similar issue, we must continually adapt, and evolve our software, in response to our customer’s needs, and current technology trends, if we don’t evolve our software, our competitors will evolve theirs faster, and our business group, will gradually cease to exist, without competitive, and evolving software. The software evolution phenomenon was first identified in the late 60s though not termed as such till 1974. The goal of this article, is to explore the current literature on software evolution, and its impacts on software development activities, and software organizations. As a manager, and practicing Software Engineer, software evolvability, the ability, inter alia, for responsiveness and timely implementation of needed changes, will play an ever increasing more critical role in ensuring the survival of a society ever more dependent on computers