In building a computer system, it is possible to anticipate some ways in which the system's requirements might evolve, leaving hooks and other build-in variation points in the design and implementation to accommodate such possible changes. But predicting the future is notoriously difficult. Most of the expense and technical complications of software evolution comes from changes not anticipated in the original design.

Unanticipated software evolution (USE) addresses changes for which developers have not prepared during the design and implementation of a software system.

The USE workshop series is dedicated to promoting emerging technologies that recognize the inevitability of unanticipated changes and work to accommodate such changes. Clever techniques in areas such as tools, programming languages and environments, component models, architectures and runtime infrastructures can ease the task of evolving a software system in ways not prepared for by its original creators.

Without USE technology, unanticipated changes often force software engineers to do what they do now: perform extensive and expensive invasive modification of existing designs and code. USE technology offers the promise of being able to do more automatically, often dynamically and with greater certainty of success.

The USE workshop series is intended to promote contact among researchers and practitioners interested in learning about and advancing the state of the art in unanticipated software evolution. 

FUSE 2004

International Workshop on Foundations of Unanticipated Software Evolution, March 27-28, 2004, Barcelona, Spain (in conjunction with ETAPS 2004).

USE 2003

Second International Workshop on Unanticipated Software Evolution, April 6, 2003, Warsaw, Poland (in conjunction with ETAPS 2003)

USE 2002

First International Workshop on Unanticipated Software Evolution, June 11, 2002, Malaga, Spain (in conjunction with ECOOP 2002)