Network analysis of software change history for understanding software evolution
Published in In the proceedings of 17th IEEE International Multi Topic Conference 2014, 2014
Recommended citation: Jaweria Kanwal, Onaiza Maqbool, Rabeeh Abbasi, Abdul Abbasi, "Network analysis of software change history for understanding software evolution." In the proceedings of 17th IEEE International Multi Topic Conference 2014, 2014. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7097342/
When software systems grow large and complex, understanding the dependencies in the system and making changes become difficult. History-based analysis of change dependencies (i.e. co-changing relation among entities) can facilitate system understanding, maintenance and prediction of evolutionary trends. In this paper we propose techniques to understand evolution in software change dependencies. Version repository data of Android platform is used as a case study and analysis of change dependencies is presented. Experimental analysis shows that the proposed approach provides an interesting view of software evolution in the context of change dependencies that reveals previously unknown facts about changing files in the system.