Software Reengineering for Evolution

Software evolution is the process of conducting continuous software reengineering. Reengineering implies a single change cycle, but evolution can go on forever. In other words, to a large extent, software evolution is repeated software reengineering. Therefore, this book discusses many technical details of reengineering. Any computing system, including hardware and software systems, will inevitably grow in scale and functionality. Because of this complexity, the likelihood of subtle errors is much greater. Moreover, some of these errors may cause catastrophic loss of money, time, or even human life. Large systems are so complex that it is impossible for a single individual to build and maintain all aspects of the system’s design. A major goal of software engineering is to enable developers to construct systems that operate reliably despite this complexity [1–4]. One way of achieving this goal is using formal methods, mathematically-based languages, techniques, and tools for specifying and verifying software systems. Using formal methods does not guarantee correctness, but they can greatly increase our understanding of a system by revealing inconsistencies, ambiguities, and incompleteness that might otherwise go undetected [5].