Analyzing Software Updates: Should You Build a Dynamic Updating Infrastructure?

The ability to adapt software systems to fix bugs, add/change features without restarting it is becoming important for many domains including but not limited to finance, social networking, control systems, etc. Fortunately, many ideas have begun to emerge under the umbrella term "Dynamic updating" to solve this problem. Dynamic updating is critical to address certain software evolution needs. Dynamic updating literature evaluates such systems in terms of coverage (i.e. what type of code changes are supported) and performance. However, the authors do not have a technique to analyze whether certain updating solution, based on its costs and benefits, is suitable for an application.