Title
Structural evolution of software: a social network perspective.
Abstract
Structural evolution of an object oriented software is studied using a class collaboration network. The emergence of scale-free property in this network from what could be a random network suggests an inherent process of structural optimization. In the past, software evolution was studied using object oriented metrics. But, these metrics limit our understanding of structural evolution because they are object-class centric and do not take into account the complex relations that span across the structure. As an initial attempt, we apply the social network theories to uncover this hard-to-understand yet essential process of structural evolution. We discuss our findings related to the occurrences of complex relations and influential object-classes that resist the optimization. We do so by observing the revisions chosen at different stages of evolution from open-source software projects.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1145/2593868.2593872
WETSoM
Keywords
Field
DocType
metrics,social network analysis,software evolution
Random graph,Social network,Object-oriented programming,Systems engineering,Computer science,Social network analysis,Software,Software evolution,Class collaboration
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.37
8
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Naveen N. Kulkarni163.46
Satya Prateek Bommaraju210.37
Madhuri Dasa310.37