TY - GEN
T1 - Towards a better understanding of software evolution
T2 - 2009 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, ICSM 2009
AU - Xie, Guowu
AU - Chen, Jianbo
AU - Neamtiu, Iulian
PY - 2009
Y1 - 2009
N2 - Software evolution is a fact of life. Over the past thirty years, researchers have proposed hypotheses on how software changes, and provided evidence that both supports and refutes these hypotheses. To paint a clearer image of the software evolution process, we performed an empirical study on long spans in the lifetime of seven open source projects. Our analysis covers 653 official releases, and a combined 69 years of evolution. We first tried to verify Lehman's laws of software evolution. Our findings indicate that several of these laws are confirmed, while the rest can be either confirmed or infirmed depending on the laws' operational definitions. Second, we analyze the growth rate for projects' development and maintenance branches, and the distribution of software changes. We find similarities in the evolution patterns of the programs we studied, which brings us closer to constructing rigorous models for software evolution.
AB - Software evolution is a fact of life. Over the past thirty years, researchers have proposed hypotheses on how software changes, and provided evidence that both supports and refutes these hypotheses. To paint a clearer image of the software evolution process, we performed an empirical study on long spans in the lifetime of seven open source projects. Our analysis covers 653 official releases, and a combined 69 years of evolution. We first tried to verify Lehman's laws of software evolution. Our findings indicate that several of these laws are confirmed, while the rest can be either confirmed or infirmed depending on the laws' operational definitions. Second, we analyze the growth rate for projects' development and maintenance branches, and the distribution of software changes. We find similarities in the evolution patterns of the programs we studied, which brings us closer to constructing rigorous models for software evolution.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=70849104325&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=70849104325&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICSM.2009.5306356
DO - 10.1109/ICSM.2009.5306356
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:70849104325
SN - 9781424448289
T3 - IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, ICSM
SP - 51
EP - 60
BT - 2009 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, ICSM 2009 - Proceedings of the Conference
Y2 - 20 September 2009 through 26 September 2009
ER -