1st ACM workshop on hot topics in software upgrades (HotSWUp 2008)

The goal of HotSWUp is to identify cutting-edge research ideas for implementing software upgrades. Actively-used software is upgraded regularly to incorporate bug fixes and security patches or to keep up with the evolving requirements. Whether upgrades are applied offline or online, they significantly impact the software's performance and reliability. Recently-introduced commercial products aim to address various aspects of this problem, e.g., programing language/framework/middleware support for online upgrade, large-scale dissemination of fine-grained updates, live data migration in storage-area networks. However, recent studies and a large body of anecdotal evidence suggest that, in practice, upgrades are failure-prone, tedious, and expensive.