English

EvoGraph: Hybrid Directed Graph Evolution toward Software 3.0

Software Engineering 2025-08-08 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

We introduce **EvoGraph**, a framework that enables software systems to evolve their own source code, build pipelines, documentation, and tickets. EvoGraph represents every artefact in a typed directed graph, applies learned mutation operators driven by specialized small language models (SLMs), and selects survivors with a multi-objective fitness. On three benchmarks, EvoGraph fixes 83% of known security vulnerabilities, translates COBOL to Java with 93% functional equivalence (test verified), and maintains documentation freshness within two minutes. Experiments show a 40% latency reduction and a sevenfold drop in feature lead time compared with strong baselines. We extend our approach to **evoGraph**, leveraging language-specific SLMs for modernizing .NET, Lisp, CGI, ColdFusion, legacy Python, and C codebases, achieving 82-96% semantic equivalence across languages while reducing computational costs by 90% compared to large language models. EvoGraph's design responds to empirical failure modes in legacy modernization, such as implicit contracts, performance preservation, and integration evolution. Our results suggest a practical path toward Software 3.0, where systems adapt continuously yet remain under measurable control.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.05199,
  title  = {EvoGraph: Hybrid Directed Graph Evolution toward Software 3.0},
  author = {Igor Costa and Christopher Baran},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.05199},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

15 pages, 3 tables, 1 algorithm. Submitted to ICSE 2025

R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:38:44.721Z