Joining scientific forces on big software

Software is increasingly like a living organism, evolving constantly and autonomously. Through continuous delivery, continuous deployment and their successor, Devops, software is changing all the time. The software that puts a book in your basket at a web store may have been altered by the time you reach the checkout screen. The key question here is: how do you consistently ensure the quality of such ever-evolving systems?

The project Big Software on the Run (3TU.BSR), a joint endeavour of the Netherlands’ three technical universities, focuses on the in vivo analysis of large software systems. Because trends like Devops blur the lines between development and deployment, system validation must shift from testing and verification at design time to monitoring at run time: only at run time do we know the application context and can we carry out the appropriate analyses and – if needed – interventions.