MC-Evo²: Multidimensional Co-Evolution in Evolving Software – MC-Evo

Software maintenance represents 40% to 80% of the total cost of developing software. On 65 projects, an IT company reported a cost of several million dollars, with a 25% higher cost on complex projects. Nowadays, software evolves frequently with the philosophy “Release early, release often” embraced by IT giants like the GAFAM. Thus, making software maintenance hard and costly. Developing complex software inevitably requires developers to handle multiple dimensions, such as APIs to use, tests to write, models to reason with, etc. When software evolves, a co-evolution is usually necessary as a follow-up, to resolve the impacts caused by the evolution changes. For example, when APIs evolve, code must be co-evolved, or when code evolves, its tests must be co-evolved. The goals of this project are to: 1) address these challenges from a novel perspective, namely a multidimensional co-evolution approach, 2) investigate empirically the multidimensional co-evolution in practice in GitHub, Maven, and Eclipse, 3) automate and propagate the multidimensional co-evolution between the software code, APIs, tests, and models.