Data-Driven Continuous Evolution of Smart Systems

As Marc Andreessen said in his Wall Street Journal OpEd, software is eating the world. The systems that we are building today and in the near future will exhibit levels of autonomy that will put new demands on the engineering of such systems. Although promising examples of autonomous systems exist, there is no established methodology for systematically building autonomous systems that employ modern software engineering technology such as continuous deployment and data-driven engineering. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it identifies and presents the challenge of continuous evolution of autonomous systems as a well-defined problem that needs to be addressed by software engineering research. Second, it presents a conceptual solution to this problem that integrates the development of new software for autonomous systems by R&D teams with systematic experimentation by autonomous systems.