Software evolution concern summarization and explanation

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Canadian society has become dependent upon software intensive systems, such as cellphones, online banking, and ultrasounds to name just a few. To keep up with our changing world, software developers must continually evolve these systems. When evolution tasks are performed incorrectly, there are consequences. For example, an incorrectly completed evolution task at the Canada Revenue Agency (CCRA) resulted in the suspension of on-line personal tax filings in early March 2007. As a result of this error, taxpayer refunds were delayed and the CCRA was forced to incur additional costs to fix the problem. To complete evolution tasks with higher quality, software developers need to communicate efficiently and effectively about the intended change and they need to perform the technical work associated with the change precisely and completely. Currently, these activities are needlessly complicated because developers are working with all of the details associated with all the kinds of information needed for the task. This research program aims to improve developer productivity and the quality of a developer's work by enabling developers to work in terms of tasks rather than having the developers mired in the details of each task. This research program will develop techniques and tools to support the representation of the fragments of software project information needed for an evolution task. We refer to this representation as an evolution concern. The representation will include automatically produced summaries and explanations of the information comprising an evolution concern, providing the abstraction that is currently lacking in a developer's work day. We will evaluate whether the techniques and tools we built to support evolution concerns can ease development activities through laboratory experiments on open-source projects and field studies within the context of industrial developments. This research will expand Canada's $100 billion dollar software production industry.