College of Computing Sciences

Software Technology Trends

Predicting software engineering trends is a difficult proposition, due to the wide range of factors that are involved, and the complexity of their interactions.  Yet, this is a valuable capability, that has great strategic value for corporate executive, governmental agencies, academic administrators, and individuals.  the purpose of this project is to model the evolution of software technology trends, so as to better understand its forces and better predict its outcomes.  To this effect, we have adopted two complementary approaches:

• An analytical, deductive, top down approach, that attempts to model the evolution of software technology trends by specializing to software general models of epistemology and cognitive processes.  This approach is summarized in sof.pdf.

• An empirical, inductive, bottom up approach, that attempts to model the evolution of specific software trends, with the long term goal of inferring general evolutionary laws from the trend-specific laws.  In this regard, we have studied evolutionary laws for Programming Languages, Operating Systems, and are now investigating Middleware Packages. 

Interested visitors are encouraged to fill our survey form at http://swtech.njit.edu/.