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4/26/2007: 3:00—3:50 at Glasgow East-117
ABSTRACT
Software evolution accounts for the lion's share of software development costs, yet there is relatively little solid foundation or automation support for this part of the life cycle. Research on software change merging has addressed one aspect of this issue. Change merging is the problem of combining several changes to a given base version of a system with a guarantee of soundness. Since changes can conflict, change merging can be viewed as either a partial operation on normal programs, or as a total operation on an extended domain that includes improper elements representing conflicts. Our change merging methods are based on the second approach, because this can provide diagnostic information to locate conflicts and in some domains can support methods for automatically resolving conflicts. We discuss examples of change merging at a variety of levels, from code to requirement specifications.
BIO:
Valdis Berzins received the PhD degree from MIT in 1979 and worked as a professor at the University of Texas and the University of Minnesota before coming to the Naval Postgraduate School. His research addresses many aspects of software engineering, with the objective of increasing productivity and software quality via automated decision support. His work has been supported the US National Science Foundation, ARO, and computer industry, resulting in numerous publications, student theses, and software systems. He designed two specification languages, and initiated software merging as a research area by developing the first semantically sound method for automatically combining extensions to software systems, a comprehensive theory of modifications to software, and the first methods for combining changes to software that treat parallel programs and algorithm optimizations. Other research directions include requirements, lightweight inference, software synthesis, risk reduction, software architectures, interoperability, reuse, and reengineering. He is the author of books on software specifications and computer-aided software maintenance.
Download the abstract here
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