Evolving dependency magnets, i.e., software modules upon which a large number of other modules depend, is always a hard task. As Robert C. Martin has nicely summarized it (see http://www.oodesign.com/design-principles.html), fundamental problems of bad design that hinder evolution include immobility, i.e., difficulty in reuse, rigidity, i.e., the tendency for software to be difficult to change and fragility, i.e., the tendency of the software to break in many places every time it is changed. In such cases, developers are reluctant to evolve the software to avoid facing the impact of change. How are these fundamentals related to schema evolution? We know that changes in the schema of a database affect a large (and not necessarily traced) number of surrounding applications, without explicit identification of the impact. These affected applications can then suffer from syntactic and semantic inconsistencies - with syntactic inconsistency leading to application crashes and semantic inconsistency leading to the retrieval of data other than the ones originally intended. Thus, the puzzle of gracefully facilitating the evolution of data-intensive information systems is evident, and the desideratum of coming up with engineering methods that allow us to design information systems with a view to minimizing the impact of evolution, a noble goal for the research community.
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机译：不断发展的依赖磁体，即大量其他模块所依赖的软件模块，始终是一项艰巨的任务。正如罗伯特·C·马丁（Robert C. Martin）很好地总结（请参阅http://www.oodesign.com/design-principles.html），不良设计的根本问题（阻碍发展）包括固定性，即难以重用，刚性，即软件难以更改和脆弱的趋势，即软件每次更改都会在许多地方崩溃的趋势。在这种情况下，开发人员不愿开发软件以避免面对变更的影响。这些基本原理与架构演变有何关系？我们知道，数据库模式的更改会影响大量（但不一定要跟踪）周围的应用程序，而无需明确识别影响。然后，这些受影响的应用程序可能会遭受语法和语义上的不一致-语法上的不一致会导致应用程序崩溃，语义上的不一致会导致检索原始目的之外的数据。因此，优雅地促进数据密集型信息系统的发展之谜是显而易见的，并且提出了使我们能够设计信息系统以最小化发展的影响的工程方法的迫切需求，这是研究的崇高目标社区。
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