Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/K86008/01
Title:	FEEDBACK, EVOLUTION AND SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY (FEAST/1)
Principal Investigator:	Lehman, Professor MMM
Other Investigators:	Stenning, Professor V Rustem, Professor B
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:	BAE Systems Logica Ministry of Defence (MOD) Pre Nexus Migration QinetiQ
Department:	Computing
Organisation:	Imperial College London
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	01 September 1996	Ends:	30 September 1998	Value (£):	244,312
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Software Engineering
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Aerospace, Defence and Marine Information Technologies No relevance to Underpinning Sectors
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
Despite intensive R&D languages, methods, tools and so on, the industrial process of software evolution is still far from satisfactory. This process includes all activity required to develop, adapt, enhance and evolve software, technical development, management, marketing, user support, user endeavour, etc. State of the art software process modelling concentrates on the forward path of technical development, largely ignoring feedback and links with other activities impacting the process. A recently formulated hypothesis suggests that the feedback nature of the global process may be the source of difficulties in achieving its major improvement. The process will be studied as a feedback system, its phenomenology and properties captured and modelled, techniques for industrial exploitation of the conclusions developed. With the help of collaborator personnel, current projects and processes will be modelled and analysed using systems dynamics and other techniques to identify feedback mechanisms and show how they constrain or otherwise impact the process and process improvement. Potential improvements will be identified and passed to the collaborators for evaluation and trial. Foundations for future work directed at further improvement of industrial software processes and a theory of software process and process improvement will be established.
Key Findings
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Potential use in non-academic contexts
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Organisation Website:	http://www.imperial.ac.uk