De Lucia A., Ferucci F., Tortora G., Tucci M. (eds.) Emerging Methods, Technologies and Process Management in Software Engineering

Hoboken: John Wiley&sons, 2008. - 296p.Recent years have witnessed rapid evolution of software engineering methodologies, and until now, there has been no single–source introduction to emerging technologies in the field.
Software dramatically impacts our everyday lives and continuously pervades our modern society. Indeed, incessant innovations in information and communication technologies provide new opportunities and quickly increase the spectrum of possible applications. These innovations pose new technical and practical challenges to software engineers who have to identify solutions to better exploit new technologies and develop new kinds of software applications. At the same time, software engineers need to maintain and evolve existing software systems to make them compliant with requirement changes and to exploit fully the opportunities provided by new technologies. As a result of software evolution, the size and complexity of software systems have been growing significantly, thus making software development and maintenance more and more challenging and requiring enhanced means.
Software engineering is then a very dynamic discipline that must continuously evolve by searching for new methods, tools, and methodologies to make software development and maintenance more reliable and efficient. Critical trade-offs related to cost, quality, and flexibility must be taken into account. For that reason, today software engineering is one of the most exciting, stimulating, and profitable research areas with significant practical impacts on software industry.
This book addresses some of the latest findings in the field of software engineering. Its chapters originate from tutorial lectures given by internationally recognized research leaders at the first three sessions of the International Summer School on Software Engineering, organized at the University of Salerno, Italy.
The book is not meant to cover all software engineering topics but rather to present a good range of current research in software engineering dealing with some very relevant and emerging topics for the scientific community. The book is intended for graduate and postgraduate students who want to approach the field as well as academic and industrial researchers working in different areas of software engineering.