SGER: Software Engineering Technology Watch

This project, carried out in close conjunction with the Software Engineering Research Center (SERC, an NSF-sponsored IUCRC Center), establishes a Software Engineering Technology Watch to track trends in Research, Technology, and the Market as relates to software engineering. The results of the these Watch activities-reports and studies-inform the respective communities about the state of the art, promising directions, and apparent failures. As part of laying the foundation for the modeling of trends, data is compiled on various aspects of the national software engineering enterprise. Example case studies would be the Internet, the Web, Java, Unix, Ada, and Linux. The activity also serves to define and refine the best strategies for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating the information, thus providing a feasibility study to determine the process to follow. Issues to address include: What cost factors guide trends, What lifecycle do technologies follow, and What aspects of technology evolution are controllable? The research develops a synthetic model of a 'technology trend,' a synthetic comparative survey of other existing tech-watch initiatives in software engineering, an identification of relevant indices and sources of information, and a report including factual information pertaining to the evolution of the field.