International Special Session on

Formal Foundations of Software Evolution

13 March 2001
Centro de Congressos do IST
Lisboa, Portugal

Co-located with the European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR 2001)

LINKS

MOTIVATION AND OBJECTIVES

Numerous scientific studies of large-scale software systems have shown that more than 80% of the total cost of software development is devoted to software maintenance. This is mainly due to the fact that software systems are under constant evolution to cope with changing requirements. Today this is more than ever the case, because of the dramatic evolution of technology, the ever changing legislation, etc. Despite this omnipresence of software evolution, existing tools that try to offer support are far from ideal. They are often implemented in an ad-hoc way, are not generally applicable, are not scalable, or they are difficult to integrate with other tools.

The goal of this workshop is to try and find out how formal techniques can alleviate those problems, and how they can lead to tools for large-scale software systems that are more robust and more widely applicable without sacrificing efficiency. Preferably, provided techniques should not be restricted to a particular phase in the software life-cycle, but should be generally applicable throughout the entire software development process.

The following is a non-limitative list of formal approaches that could be used to deal with evolution issues in a general and scalable way: rewriting-based or transformation-based approaches (e.g., term rewriting and graph rewriting); declarative reasoning and specification formalisms; logic-based approaches (e.g., temporal logic, predicate logic); category theory; graph theory; semantics-based approaches (e.g., denotational semantics); metrics-based approaches.

WORKSHOP RESULTS

Proceedings

The workshop proceedings is electronically available as a technical report UNL-DI-1-2001 (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Departamento de Informatica) as well as VUB-PROG-TR-01-03 (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Programming Technology Lab)

Workshop report

The workshop report is electronically available, and has also been published in the July 2001 issue of ACM Software Engineering Notes.

Submissions and presentations

All workshop submissions and presentations can be found below in pdf-format:

ORGANIZERS

This workshop is an offical activity of the Scientific Research Network on "Foundations of Software Evolution", and is partially financed by the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders (Belgium).