Paper Info
Title
Using normalized compression distance to measure the evolutionary stability of software systems
Abstract
Software evolutionary stability has become an important issue in software maintenance and evolution. It is directly related to software reusability, maintainability and evolvability. In reported prior research, software evolutionary stability has been measured with architecture-level metrics, including reference points and program-level metrics, such as number of modules and number of lines of code. In this paper, information-level metrics based on Kolmogorov complexity are used to measure the differences between versions of software products. Using normalized compression distance, various evolutionary stability metrics of software artifacts are defined: version stability, branch stability, structure stability and aggregate stability. Case studies are performed on two open-source products, Apache HTTP server and Apache Ant build tool. The results from this study show that information-level evolutionary stability metrics can be used together with architecture-level metrics and program-level metrics to assist monitoring the software evolution process, as well as identifying stable or unstable software artifacts.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/ISSRE.2015.7381805
International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
Software evolution, software evolutionary stability, software distance, software metrics, Kolmogorov complexity, normalized compression distance
Computer science,Software system,Software metric,Software visualization,Software verification and validation,Software construction,Software evolution,Software measurement,Reliability engineering,Software sizing
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.40
28
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
David Threm140.79
Liguo Yu228429.33
srini ramaswamy333745.77
Sithu D. Sudarsan4207.39