Software companies regularly launch new releases of their products. Providing these software updates is a crucial aspect of quality assurance, customer satisfaction and safety. Extensions and repairs should be installed as soon as possible. This is usually an expensive and error prone process. Even when updates are installed automatically, things can go wrong. Remember the recent problems with the automatic update functionality of Microsoft Windows: Installing a certain update left the system in a corrupt state. Other systems also regularly suffer problems when actualizing software applications.
In his PhD dissertation Component-based Configuarion, Integration and Delivery, Tijs van der Storm (CWI) studied how software delivery can be automated in the context of software composed of many components. Van der Storm developed techniques to enable software producers to automatically provide users with new releases any time a change is made in the source code. Users can install these updates with a minimum of effort. In the end, these techniques might facilitate the development of self-updating applications. The resulting tool Sisyphus is used in the development of the Meta-Environment, a framework for language development, source code analysis and source code transformation. Van der Storm will receive his PhD on November 20, 2007, at the University of Amsterdam.
More information can be found on SEN1's website, Tijs van der Storm's homepage, the Meta-Environment web pages or the Dutch text on the PhD dissertation (UvA website)
