As dynamic software architecture use becomes more widespread, a variety of formal specification languages have been developed to gain a better understanding of the foundations of this type of software evolutionary change. In this paper we survey 14 formal specification approaches based on graphs, process algebras, logic, and other formalisms. Our survey will evaluate the ability of each approach to specify self-managing systems as well as the ability to address issues regarding expressiveness and scalability. Based on the results of our survey we will provide recommendations on future directions for improving the specification of dynamic software architectures, specifically self-managed architectures.

Today's information technology society increasingly relies on software at all levels. Nevertheless, software quality generally continues to fall short of expectations, and software systems continue to suffer from symptoms of aging as they are adapted to changing requirements and environments. The only way to overcome or avoid the negative effects of software aging is by placing change and evolution in the center of the software development process. In this article we describe what we believe to be some of the most important research challenges in software evolution. The goal of this document is to provide novel research directions in the software evolution domain.

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To prioritize software maintenance activities, it is important to identify which programming flaws impact most on an application's evolution. Recent empirical studies on such a flaw, code clones, have focused on one of the arguments to consider clones harmful, namely, that related clones are not updated consistently. We believe that a wider notion is needed to assess the effect of cloning on evolution. This paper compares measures of the maintenance effort on methods with clones against those without. Statistical and graphical analysis suggests that having a clone may increase the maintenance effort of changing a method. The effort seems to increase depending on the percentage of the system affected whenever the methods that share the clone are modified. We also found that some methods seem to increase significantly their maintenance effort when a clone was present. However, the characteristics analyzed in these methods did not reveal any systematic relation between cloning and such maintenance effort increase.

Abstract-Studies have demonstrated the importance of good identifier names to program comprehension. It is unclear, however, whether poor naming has other effects that might impact maintenance effort, e.g. on code quality. We evaluated the quality of identifier names in 8 established open source Java applications libraries, using a set of 12 identifier naming guidelines. We found statistically significant associations between flawed identifiers (i.e. violating at least one guideline) and code quality issues reported by FindBugs, a static analysis tool.