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 inevit...

t's no secret among embedded developers that embedded software is difficult to debug. Granted, debugging in general is no picnic, but embedded software poses special challenges for several reasons. For one thing, it is difficult to retrieve data from embedded software. The debugging process relies on output and feedback from an application, but embedded software lacks the print screen that deve...

Code reuse is a form of knowledge reuse in software development, which is fundamental to innovation in many fields. Yet, to date, there has been no systematic investigation of code reuse in open source software projects. This study uses quantitative and qualitative data gathered from a sample of six open source software projects to explore two sets of research questions derived from the literat...

Empirical research aimed at understanding how individuals interact and share their knowledge in a distributed software development environment has traditionally been very difficult because the source of knowledge, the code, has been a guarded secret and software developers and users were seldom in contact, thus making it difficult to study, in situ, all the individuals involved in the software ...

It is impossible to separate the human factors from software engineering expertise during software development, because software is developed by people and for people. The intangible nature of software has made it a difficult product to successfully create, and an examination of the many reasons for major software system failures show that the reasons for failures eventually come down to human ...

Object-oriented language features such as inheritance, abstract types, late-binding, or polymorphism lead to distributed and scattered code, rendering a software system hard to understand and maintain. The integrated development environment (IDE), the primary tool used by developers to maintain software systems, usually purely operates on static source code and does not reveal dynamic relations...

Software testing is the important phase of software development process. But, this phase can be easily missed by software developers because of their limited time to complete the project. Since, software developers finish their software nearer to the delivery time; they don’t get enough time to test their program by creating effective test cases. . One of the major difficulties in software test...

Four patterns intended to support the development of embedded systems are presented in this paper. These patterns are written for developers of software, and some associated hardware, for the ubiquitous 8051 family of microcontrollers. There are primarily intended to assist software developers who have experience in ‘desktop’ software development (in C or a related language) in the process of a...

Context: The context of this research is software developers’ perceptions about the use of code examples in professional software development. Objective: The primary objective of this paper is to identify the human factors that dominate example usage among professional software developers, and to provide a theory that explains these

A central tenet of the open source software development methodology is that the community of users and developers is instrumental in improving the quality of software. Using a 10-year longitudinal dataset from the Firefox community, I investigate how the size of a community in terms of bug reporters and software developers, the social networks of developers and the quality of user contributions...