Bits of History, Challenges for the Future and Autonomic Computing Technology

Over the past fifteen years, the software reverse engineering community has produced many software engineering methods, tools, and techniques that have had significant impact in the software industry. After a research area has evolved for 10-20 years, it can easily fade away due to narrow focus, overgrazing, or lack of impact. Trying to assess the impact of various approaches and results in a research area is difficult - but worthwhile. Taking a step back and looking at a research area from new perspectives is probably easier and can be invigorating. The lessons learned from such exercises may result in new research challenges, foster cross-fertilization among research areas, and shape the focus of the research communities. Inspired by several recent studies that assess the field of software engineering as a whole to define research agendas and funding policies, the author discuss several new perspectives on the problem of continuous software evolution that will hopefully inspire the reverse engineering community. The author then advocate that we need to push monitoring of evolving systems to unprecedented levels to be able to observe and possibly orchestrate their continuous evolution in a complex and changing environment. The author then suggest to instrument evolving software-intensive systems with autonomic elements, using reverse engineering techniques, to enhance their monitoring and assessment capabilities