Dr. Stefanie Rinderle-Ma hat an der Fakultät für Ingenieurwissenschaften und Informatik Universität Ulm am 4. Februar 2009 ihre Habilitation für Informatik mit großem Erfolg abgeschlossen. Hierzu gratulieren alle Mitarbeiter des Instituts für Datenbanken und Information (DBIS) herzlich. Mit ihrer Habilitation erlangt Stefanie die "Venia legendi" für das Fachgebiet der Informatik. Sie wird auch in Zunkunft weiter für das DBIS-Institut als Privatdozentin wirken. Der Titel ihrer (kumulativen) Habilitationsschrift lautet: "On the Controlled Evolution of Information Systems". Untenstehend findet sich eine kurze (englischsprachige) Zusammenfassung.

*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.