“When legacy code turns into senescent code: Assessing software aging and its implications” accepted for 5th European Technology Assessment
The paper “When legacy code turns into senescent code: Assessing software aging and its implications” by Philip König, Kevin Mallinger and Alexander Schatten was accepted for the 5th European Technology Assessment and will be presented there in March 2022. It will also be published in Digital Future(s): TA in and for a Changing World.
Summary of the abstract
Various studies imply that software aging is a real phenomenon whereupon continuous execution of programs leads to a gradual build-up of errors and overall degradation of performance. Strange and unclear behavior emerges from interactions of new and old modules, which in the worst case manifest itself in crashes, errors and other unwanted responses. While technology assessment methodologies concerning software aging have been developed, none drew inspiration from the natural sciences, where by abstracting similar processes in biology and computer science the fundamental problems and their solutions can be analyzed and then transferred from one to another.
The abstract got accepted, the full paper will be available in December.