The Software Evolution Research Lab

SWERL

The majority of the costs involved in software development is spent after the software product's first release. Software systems tend to evolve continuously, for various reasons, such as changes in law, technology, market demands, and so on. The negative side effect of this continuous evolution is a degradation of the internal structure of the software system. This in turn, makes it more and more costly and more difficult to make the required changes, and ultimately leads to a rigid and unreliable system that is virtually impossible to change.

The Software Evolution Research Laboratory aims at addressing this software evolution paradox in three ways:

1. First, we aim at developing new programming methods and techniques that help to prevent rapid deterioration of the system's structure when changes are to be made. Example topics include aspect-oriented software development and domain-specific languages.
2. Second, we search for program analysis techniques that help to uncover hidden structures in software systems that have undergone continuous evolution. Example topics in this area are software architecture reconstruction and aspect mining.
3. Third, we investigate ways to restructure overly complex software systems. Topics studied include refactoring, migrations, and program transformations.

Most of our research projects are conducted in collaboration with one or more industrial partners, as well as with other academic institutes (see our list of Research Projects). We are also actively involved in a number of Conferences.

SWERL is part of the Software Engineering Research Group, department of Software Technology, faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology.

SWERL was founded on January 1st, 2003.