Automating Software Re-engineering - Introduction to the ISoLA 2020 Track.

Software Engineering as a discipline and, in particular, as a research field within Computer Science, is still mainly focused on methods, techniques, processes, and tools to develop software from scratch. In reality, however, greenfield scenarios are not the most common ones. It is important to realize that dynamic evolution of software became a much more common and relevant issue in recent times, and its importance keeps growing. Software refactoring, parallelization, adaptation, therefore, become central activities in the value chain: automating them can realize huge gains. Formal approaches to software modeling and analysis are poised to make a substantial contribution to software re-engineering, because they are fundamentally concerned with automation and correctness. This potential, however, is far from being realized. Formal methods tend to aim at software development ab ovo or look at some piece of given software as a static object. This state of affairs motivated a track on Automating Software Re-Engineering, where we invited a group of leading researchers with an active interest in the automation of software re-engineering to discuss the state of the art.