Getting Farther on Software Evolution via AOP and Reflection

Following last four years' RAM-SE (Reflection, AOP and Meta-Data for Software Evolution) workshop at the ECOOP conference, the RAM-SE'08 workshop was a successful and popular event. As its name implies, the workshop's focus was on the application of reflective, aspect-oriented and data-mining techniques to the broad field of software evolution. Topics and discussions at the workshop included mechanisms for supporting software evolution, technological limits of the aspect-oriented and reflective approaches to software evolution and tools devoted to software evolution. The workshop's main goal was to bring together researchers working in the field of software evolution with a particular interest in reflection, aspect-oriented programming and meta-data. The workshop was organized as a full day meeting, partly devoted to presentation of submitted position papers and partly devoted to panel discussions about the presented topics and other interesting issues in the field. In this way, the workshop allowed participants to get acquainted with each other's work, and stimulated collaboration. We hope this helped participants in improving their ideas and the quality of their future publications. The workshop's proceedings, including all accepted position papers can be downloaded from the workshop's web site and a post workshop proceeding, including an extension of the accepted paper is planned to be published by the University of Magdeburg. In this report, we provide a session-by-session overview of the workshop, and then present our opinions about future trends in software evolution.