  Changes, they use to say, are the only constant in life. Everything changes
rapidly around us, and more and more key to survival is the ability to rapidly
adapt to changes. This consideration applies to many aspects of our lives.
Strangely enough, this nearly self-evident truth is not always considered by
software engineers with the seriousness that it calls for: The assumptions we
draw for our systems often do not take into due account that e.g., the run-time
environments, the operational conditions, or the available resources will vary.
Software is especially vulnerable to this threat, and with today's
software-dominated systems controlling crucial services in nuclear plants,
airborne equipments, health care systems and so forth, it becomes clear how
this situation may potentially lead to catastrophes. This paper discusses this
problem and defines some of the requirements towards its effective solution,
which we call "New Software Development" as a software equivalent of the
well-known concept of New Product Development. The paper also introduces and
discusses a practical example of a software tool designed taking those
requirements into account --- an adaptive data integrity provision in which the
degree of redundancy is not fixed once and for all at design time, but rather
it changes dynamically with respect to the disturbances experienced during the
run time.
