A Case for Establishing Evolutionary Policies and their Support Mechanisms, with Examples †

An important trait of a mature discipline is that, amongst other things, practitioners have specific criteria to judge the appropriateness of the different courses of action to take under a given circumstance, or whether a given task has been well-accomplished. These criteria may be in the form of templates, checklists, rules-of-thumb, constraints, policies and laws, which have resulted from many years of experience with repeated application of these in different situations. There is data to support that software evolution practices are far from mature. Thus, in this position statement, we make a case for establishing a (i) comprehensive set of evolutionary policies and (ii) their support mechanisms, to guide development 1 in the context of the instituted policies. A benefit of utilising established policies and their support mechanisms is that the sustainability of the evolving systems would likely be increased. 1