Software evolution concern summarization and explanation

加拿大社会已经变得依赖于软件密集型系统，比如手机、网上银行和超声波等等。为了跟上我们不断变化的世界，软件开发人员必须不断发展这些系统。当进化任务执行不正确时，就会产生一些后果。例如，2007年3月初，加拿大税务局（CCRA）错误地完成了演变任务，导致在线个人税务申报暂停。由于这个错误，纳税人的退款被推迟，CCRA被迫承担额外的费用来解决这个问题。为了以更高的质量完成演进任务，软件开发人员需要就预期的变更进行高效和有效的沟通，并且他们需要精确和完整地执行与变更相关的技术工作。目前，这些活动是不必要的复杂，因为开发人员正在处理与任务所需的各种信息相关的所有细节。该研究计划旨在通过使开发人员能够按照任务进行工作，而不是让开发人员陷入每个任务的细节中，从而提高开发人员的生产力和开发人员工作的质量。这个研究计划将开发技术和工具来支持一个进化任务所需的软件项目信息片段的表示。我们将此表示称为进化关注。这种表示将包括自动生成的包含演化关注的信息的摘要和解释，提供开发人员日常工作中目前缺乏的抽象。我们将评估我们构建的技术和工具是否能够通过开源项目的实验室实验和工业发展背景下的实地研究来简化开发活动。这项研究将扩大加拿大价值1000亿美元的软件生产产业。

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.