SERIOUS: Software Evolution, Refactoring, Improvement of Operational & Usable Systems

Software intensive systems evolve during their lifetime, which inevitably results in degrading software quality. In order to extend the lifetime of their products, organisations must adopt a more mature – evolutionary – software development approach that pays attention to quality aspects during all phases of the product life cycle. In this paper we list the achievements and lessons learned that were obtained during the SERIOUS project, an European research project that tested state-of-the-art techniques, tools and processes on numerous case studies in varying industrial contexts. The application of evolutionary software development resulted in changes in the state-of-practice, yielding reduced total development costs and increased product lifetimes for the participating business units.