On the requirements of new software development

Change, they usually say, is the only constant in life. Everything rapidly changes around us, and increasingly, the key to survival is the ability to adapt rapidly to changes. This consideration applies to many aspects of our lives. Strangely enough, this nearly self-evident truth is not always considered by software engineers with the seriousness that it calls for: the assumptions we draw for our systems often do not take into due account that, for example, the run-time environments, the operational conditions, or the available resources will vary. Software is especially vulnerable to this threat, and with today's software-dominated systems controlling crucial services in nuclear plants, airborne equipment, healthcare systems and so forth, it becomes clear how this situation may potentially lead to catastrophes. This work discusses this problem and defines some of the requirements towards its effective solution, which we call 'new software development', as the software equivalent of the well-known concept of new product development. The paper also introduces and discusses a practical example of a software tool that was designed taking those requirements into account – an adaptive data integrity provision in which the degree of redundancy is not fixed once and for all at design time, but rather changes dynamically with respect to the disturbances experienced during run-time.