What do we and what don't we know about software evolution?

Abstract: The cost of evolving software systems has always been a dominant cost in the software lifecycle. A number of design techniques and tools have been developed over the past three decades, many of which are intended to reduce the costs of change. Even in the face of these approaches, the costs of software evolution are still very high, probably higher than in the past. Why are these costs still so high, and what, if anything, can we do to reduce them? What techniques and tools are especially promising, and why?

Biography: David Notkin is the Boeing Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Before joining the faculty in 1984, he received his PhD degree at Carnegie Mellon University in 1984 and his ScB degree at Brown University in 1977. Dr. Notkin received the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1988; served as the program chair of the First ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering; served as program co-chair of the 17th International Conference on Software Engineering; chaired the Steering committee of the International Conference on Software Engineering (1994-1996); served as charter associate editor of both ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology and the Journal of Programming Languages; serves as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering; was named as an ACM Fellow in 1998; and serves as the chair of ACM SIGSOFT. His research interests are in software engineering in general and in software evolution in particular. Dr. Notkin is a senior member of the IEEE.