Software Evolution and Natural Processes: A Taxonomy of Approaches

Nowadays, we notice a proliferation of bio-inspired approaches that use various biological metaphors to deal with software complexity and maintenance. This proliferation is emphasized by the amount of improvement that has occurred in hardware technology as well as development tools and methods. Unfortunately, we notice a lack of a suitable framework that positions approaches, characterizes their concepts and favor their enhancement. In this article, we propose a set of criteria for characterizing bio-inspired software systems and show that software evolution can be dealt with using natural processes.