Software engineering is a rapidly growing and changing field. Over the last dec ade, it has gained significant popularity, and it is now heralded as a discipline of its own. This edited collection presents recent advances in software engineering in the areas of evolution, comprehension, and evaluation. The theme of the book addresses the increasing need to understand and assess software systems in order to measure their quality, maintain them, adapt them to changing requirements and technology, and migrate them to new platforms. This need can be satisfied by studying how software systems are built and maintained, by finding new paradigms, and by building new tools to support the activities involved in devel oping contemporary software systems. The contributions to the book are from major results and findings of leading researchers, under the mandate of the Consortium for Software Engineering Re search (CSER). CSER has been in existence since 1996. The five founding in dustrial and academic partners wanted to create a research environment that would appeal to the applied nature of the industrial partners, as well as to ad vance the state of the art and develop fresh expertise. The research projects of the Consortium are partially funded by the industrial partners, and partially by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Technical and administrative management of the Consortium is provided by the National Research Council of Canada-specifically by members of the Software Engi neering Group ofthe Institute for Information Technology.
