Research on the phenomenon of software drift in software processes

Software drift is a common phenomenon existing in software processes. Negative drift makes function, performance and even overall quality of a software product deviate from customers´ expectations, which bring about the loss to users and software organizations in succession. In this paper, software drift and its relevant concepts are defined initially. Then, an evolutional model of negative drift is presented, and detrimental effects of the model are also analyzed. How to analyze, measure, and control negative drift is an essential problem to be solved in software evolution. Eventually, we put forward a research framework to guide future work to measure and control negative drift for improving software processes.