A large-scale study of architectural evolution in open-source software systems

作者：Behnamghader Pooyan^*; Duc Minh Le; Garcia Joshua; Link Daniel; Shahbazian Arman; Medvidovic Nenad

来源：Empirical Software Engineering, 2017, 22(3): 1146-1193.

DOI：10.1007/s10664-016-9466-0

• Software architecture
• Architectural change
• Software evolution
• Open-source software
• Architecture recovery

From its very inception, the study of software architecture has recognized architectural decay as a regularly occurring phenomenon in long-lived systems. Architectural decay is caused by repeated, sometimes careless changes to a system during its lifespan. Despite decay's prevalence, there is a relative dearth of empirical data regarding the nature of architectural changes that may lead to decay, and of developers' understanding of those changes. In this paper, we take a step toward addressing that scarcity by introducing an architecture recovery framework, ARCADE, for conducting large-scale replicable empirical studies of architectural change across different versions of a software system. ARCADE includes two novel architectural change metrics, which are the key to enabling large-scale empirical studies of architectural change. We utilize ARCADE to conduct an empirical study of changes found in software architectures spanning several hundred versions of 23 open-source systems. Our study reveals several new findings regarding the frequency of architectural changes in software systems, the common points of departure in a system's architecture during the system's maintenance and evolution, the difference between system-level and component-level architectural change, and the suitability of a system's implementation-level structure as a proxy for its architecture.

• 出版日期2017-6