Laws and principles of evolution

Abstract

The understanding of system evolution is of fundamental importance to the software engineering enterprise. Lehman's Laws have been a fundamental and seminal start on the road to that understanding. However, we have a long way to go. We need more instances of systems and their evolution. We need more attributes of those evolutions. We need related process and organizational data. It is a research area that is a rich field that will yield a deep understanding of the phenomena of system evolution. But, we have a long way to go and a lot of work to do.