The Dual Nature of Software Aging: Twenty Years of Software Aging Research

Twenty years have passed since the expression software aging was coined. Research in this area has progressed in two almost autonomous directions. A software engineering perspective, concerned with the aging of software products over their lifetime, and a software dependability perspective, concerned with run time aging of (long) running applications. I argue these two visions should be reconciled, in the hope to open new research areas able to provide a wider and deeper understanding of the very nature of software aging phenomena.