Dr. Stefanie Rinderle-Ma successfully defended her "Habilitation" in Computer Science at the University of Ulm on February 4th, 2009. All staff members of the "Institute of Databases and Information Systems" (DBIS) congratulte her on this great success. From now on, Stefanie holds a "Venia legendi" in the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science; i.e., she has the formal right to teach "Computer Science" at German universities. The title of her (cumulative) habilitation thesis is as follows: "On the Controlled Evolution of Information Systems". Below you can find a short abstract.

*On the Controlled Evolution of Information Systems by Stefanie Rinderle-Ma*
Information systems constitute one of the key technologies within almost any enterprise. Examples include database management systems, data warehouse systems, and process-aware information systems. While methods and tools for developing information systems have become increasingly mature during the last years, the maintenance and evolution of information systems as well as flexibility still pose big challenges. As case studies have shown, the costs for adapting information systems to heal design errors, for example, often explode in the maintenance phase. In addition, new paradigms like service-oriented computing and business process support crave for agility, on-the-demand computing, and on-the-fly information system evolution.
Basically, the aspect-oriented development of information systems provides a good basis for their evolution due to the inherent principle of separation of concerns. However, this comes along with the challenge to not only enable the evolution of one concern, but also to control the side-effects of corresponding changes with respect to other concerns. Thus, the challenge for supporting information system evolution is twofold. First of all, we have to provide methods for changing single concerns within an information systems during runtime. Secondly, we must be able to control them in an adequate way. The fundamental goal of the research presented in this thesis is to provide adequate IT support for dealing with these challenges. Specifically, this thesis focuses on the evolution of three essential concerns of any information system - processes, knowledge, and access control. We analyze the dependencies between these different aspects and provide techniques for evolving each of them in a correct and efficient manner. Furthermore, we also deal with the question of how to transfer these new technologies to end-users; i.e., how to enable non-experts to make use of the new concepts. In this context, we show, for example, how knowledge on previous changes can be analyzed and exploited in order to support users in specifying respective changes to react on exceptional situations. Our overall goal is to provide a technology, which enables full life cycle support for information systems.