Network-Based Analysis of Software Change Propagation
The object-oriented software systems frequently evolve to meet new change requirements. Understanding the characteristics of changes aids testers and system designers to improve the quality of softwares. Identifying important modules becomes a key issue in the process of evolution. In this context,...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Hindawi Limited
2014-01-01
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| Series: | The Scientific World Journal |
| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/237243 |
| Summary: | The object-oriented software systems frequently
evolve to meet new change requirements. Understanding the
characteristics of changes aids testers and system designers
to improve the quality of softwares. Identifying important
modules becomes a key issue in the process of evolution. In
this context, a novel network-based approach is proposed
to comprehensively investigate change distributions and the
correlation between centrality measures and the scope of
change propagation. First, software dependency networks
are constructed at class level. And then, the number of
times of cochanges among classes is minded from software
repositories. According to the dependency relationships and
the number of times of cochanges among classes, the
scope of change propagation is calculated. Using Spearman
rank correlation analyzes the correlation between centrality
measures and the scope of change propagation. Three case
studies on java open source software projects Findbugs, Hibernate, and Spring are conducted to research the characteristics
of change propagation. Experimental results show
that (i) change distribution is very uneven; (ii) PageRank, Degree, and CIRank are significantly correlated to the scope
of change propagation. Particularly, CIRank shows higher
correlation coefficient, which suggests it can be a more useful
indicator for measuring the scope of change propagation of
classes in object-oriented software system. |
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| ISSN: | 2356-6140 1537-744X |