Software and Biological Evolvability: A Comparison Using Key Properties

Biological and software systems share a common property from evolution: they need to change and adapt to either a new environment or a new requirement. If the environment or requirement changes, those systems that have high evolvability will survive and others will be eliminated. The evolvability of a biological system has been widely studied and shown to be dependent on several properties: self-organization, modularity, gene duplication, gene robustness, and symbiosis. This position paper discusses the evolvability of a software system with respect to these properties. Our study shows that software systems share similar evolvability properties with biological systems. We conclude that studying and comparing the internal structures as well as the overall evolution process of these biological systems can help us understand software systems from a holistic ´product-lifecycle´ perspective thereby helping us develop software systems with better evolvability traits