Iesem: Integrated Environment for Software Evolution Management

Software evolution has not a common paradigm which practitioners can adhere to. On the contrary, there is a wide range of models, methods, techniques, and tools which are selected according to the specific task, the application domain, the professional experience and the organizational culture. We argue that different approaches and technologies may be combined into a unique platform to satisfy the needs of software systems which evolve over long periods of time. This paper presents the Integrated Environment for Software Evolution Management (IESEM) which includes software repositories, reverse engineering tools, rationale capture tools, software measurement tools, and a user-friendly interface. It can manage heterogeneous systems characterized by various design methods and programming languages. IESEM is based on a central repository which stores software engineering artifacts, program code, design and implementation decisions in the form of a traceability graph. The repository stores also software