Rules and Tools for Software Evolution Planning and Management

When first formulated in the early seventies, the laws of software evolution were, for a number of reasons, not widely accepted as relevant to software engineering practice. Over the years, they have gradually become recognised as providing useful inputs to understanding of the software process and have found their place in a number of software engineering curricula. Now eight in number, they have been supplemented by a Software Uncertainty Principle and a FEAST Hypothesis. Based on all these and on the results of the recent FEAST/1 and current FEAST/2 research projects, this paper develops and presents some fifty rules for application in software system process planning and management and indicates tools available or to be developed to support their application. The listing is structured according to the laws that encapsulate the observed phenomena and that lead to the recommended procedure. Each sub-list is preceded by a textual discussion providing at least some of the justification for the recommended procedure. The text is fully referenced. This directs the interested reader to the literature that records observed behaviours, interpretations, models and metrics obtained from some three of the industrially evolved systems studied, and from which the recommendations were derived.