Software Evolution Management: Industrial Practices

The complexity of modern software systems and the global competition make the adoption of model-based techniques unavoidable. A higher level of abstraction not only allows to mitigate the intricacy of the development, e.g., through separation of concerns, but it is also expected to permit shorter round-trip cycles to add new system functionalities, fix bugs, and refine existing features. This paper reports practical experiences in the management of industrial software evolution collected by means of semi-structured interviews with software development experts. All the interviewed companies develop embedded real-time safety-critical systems and aim at reaching more agile processes. Interestingly, while model-based methodologies appear to be widely accepted, shortening round-trip cycles due to changes appears still to be a major issue towards a more efficient development process.