Software Adaptation through Dynamic Updating Software Adaptation through Dynamic Updating

Abstract Software systems evolve continuously. They need to be updated to fix bugs, to improve their performance or to adapt their functionality to new user requirements. In their first approaches, these updating techniques required that the corresponding program was not in use, substituting it with its new version and using such new version thereafter. This is still a valid procedure for single-user programs being run in personal computers. However, there are other kinds of software that should be always available, demanding a dynamic (i.e., at run-time) software update. This paper surveys the regular goals and currently existing mechanisms able to drive a dynamic software updating procedure