RECIPE: REQUIREMENTS FOR AN EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTER-BASED INFORMATION PROCESSING ENVIRONMENT.

The authors discuss the formulation of requirements and principles for the construction of an automated software development system that supports a reasoned and well-managed process of computer-based information system development, maintainance, and use. It is argued that such development systems should allow software to evolve in two senses. An evolutionary system consists of an evolving set of components and interrelations between them, and furthermore it involves techniques or components supporting a self-adaptive, reasoned, and well-managed evolution of the system to obtain successively better approximations to the ideal requirements and goals of the user community. The authors' notion of an evolutionary system seeks to integrate the concerns of the separate approaches based on formal mathematics, computer science, experimental science, and engineering.