Featured Topic: Software Cybernetics INTRODUCTION

摘要

Software Cybernetics can be defined as the interplay of software engineering and control theory. On the one hand critical decisions are commonplace during the development cycle of any software system and often such decisions must be based solely on the experience and expertise of technical personnel. It should be noted that such expertise is not always available. On the other hand control theory cancompletely regulate certain physical processes. The goal of Software Cybernetics is to bring these two techniques as close as possible. Although the software development process is not a physical system, many metrics and measurements can be used to control the process and assist in decision making. This special issue of the International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering containsthree papers with explicit focus on control theoretic decision making in the software development process.