Over the past fifteen years, the software reverse engineering community has produced many software engineering methods, tools, and techniques that have had significant impact in the software industry. After a research area has evolved for 10-20 years, it can easily fade away due to narrow focus, overgrazing, or lack of impact. Trying to assess the impact of various approaches and results in a research area is difficult? but worthwhile. Taking a step back and looking at a research area from new perspectives is probably easier and can be invigorating. The lessons learned from such exercises may result in new research challenges, foster cross-fertilization among research areas, and shape the focus of the research communities.

Inspired by several recent studies that assess the field of software engineering as a whole to define research agendas and funding policies, I discuss several new perspectives on the problem of continuous software evolution that will hopefully inspire the reverse engineering community. I then advocate that we need to push monitoring of evolving systems to unprecedented levels to be able to observe and possibly orchestrate their continuous evolution in a complex and changing environment. I then suggest to instrument evolving software-intensive systems with autonomic elements, using reverse engineering techniques, to enhance their monitoring and assessment capabilities.