Software diversity: state of the art and perspectives

Ina Schaefer (1) , Rick Rabiser (2) , David Clarke (3) , Lorenzo Bettini (4) , David Benavides (5) , Goetz Botterweck (6) , Animesh Pathak (7) , Salvador Trujillo (8) , Karina Villela (9)

1 ISF - Institute of Software Engineering and Automotive Informatics
2 Christian Doppler Laboratory for Automated Software Engineering [Linz]
3 Department of Computer Science - K.U.Leuven
4 Dipartimento di Informatica [Torino]
5 Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos
6 The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre
7 ARLES - Software architectures and distributed systems
8 IK4 - IKERLAN [Mondragón]
9 Fraunhofer IESE - Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering

Diversity is prevalent in modern software systems to facilitate adapting the software to customer requirements or the execution environment. Diversity has an impact on all phases of the software development process. Appropriate means and organizational structures are required to deal with the additional complexity introduced by software variability. This introductory article to the special section "Software Diversity--Modeling, Analysis and Evolution" provides an overview of the current state of the art in diverse systems development and discusses challenges and potential solutions. The article covers requirements analysis, design, implementation, verification and validation, maintenance and evolution as well as organizational aspects. It also provides an overview of the articles which are part of this special section and addresses particular issues of diverse systems development.

Mots clés: Software diversity; Variability; Software product lines

Domaines: Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]

Ina Schaefer, Rick Rabiser, David Clarke, Lorenzo Bettini, David Benavides, et al.. Software diversity: state of the art and perspectives. International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer, 2012, 14 (5), pp.477-495. ⟨10.1007/s10009-012-0253-y⟩. ⟨hal-00723754⟩