Dr. Michael Godfrey

University of Waterloo

Adaptation, Selection, and Intelligent Design: The Forces Behind Software Evolution

The common view of software maintenance is that it consists mainly of fixing bugs and occasionally adding new features; in industry, maintenance is often seen a low ranking job, fit only for new hires and company deadwood. However, the forces that shape how software systems change over time are rich, complex, and subtle, and the subject of software evolution is now being studied carefully by the research community. In this talk, I will discuss some recent findings of the software evolution research community, and I will examine some of the similarities -- and differences -- between how evolution operates in software and in biology.

Biography

Michael W. Godfrey is an assistant professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, where he held an NSERC Industrial Research Associate Chair in Telecommunications Software Engineering sponsored by Nortel Networks betweeen 2001 and 2006. His research interests include software evolution, software cloning analysis, software architecture extraction and modelling, software reverse engineering and design recovery, and program comprehension. His research often involves building tools to perform specialized analyses on large industrial software systems. During the academic year 2003-04, he was a visiting professor at Sun Microsystems Research Labs in Mountain View, CA where he worked on the Jackpot project with James Gosling, and the SALSA project with John Crupi.