:Salon.com: A Unified Theory of Software Evolution
Salon.com: A Unified Theory of Software Evolution Apr 9, 2002, 14 :30 UTC (27 Talkback[s]) (7314 reads) (Other stories by Sam Williams)
"The pile, a collection of recently published papers investigating the topic of software evolution, a topic Lehman helped inaugurate back in the 1970s, is something of a taunting tribute. Written by professional colleagues at other universities, each paper cites Lehman's original 1969 IBM report documenting the evolutionary characteristics of the mainframe operating system, OS/360, or his later 1985 book 'Program Evolution: Processes of Software Change,' which expands the study to other programs. While the pile's growing size offers proof that Lehman and his ideas are finally catching on, it also documents the growing number of researchers with whom Lehman, a man with dwindling office space and even less in the way of support, must now compete.
"'And to think,' says Lehman, letting out a dry laugh. 'When I first wrote about this topic, nobody took a blind bit of notice.'
"Software evolution, i.e. the process by which programs change shape, adapt to the marketplace and inherit characteristics from preexisting programs, has become a subject of serious academic study in recent years. Partial thanks for this goes to Lehman and other pioneering researchers. Major thanks, however, goes to the increasing strategic value of software itself. As large-scale programs such as Windows and Solaris expand well into the range of 30 to 50 million lines of code, successful project managers have learned to devote as much time to combing the tangles out of legacy code as to adding new code. Simply put, in a decade that saw the average PC microchip performance increase a hundredfold, software's inability to scale at even linear rates has gone from dirty little secret to industry-wide embarrassment..."
