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

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. 1 The current version of ARCADE (ARCADE 2015) also analyzes and quantifies different symptoms of architectural decay for a given system. However, these features are currently under evaluation and are outside the scope of this paper.

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    Authors and Affiliations

    1. Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

      Pooyan Behnamghader, Duc Minh Le, Daniel Link, Arman Shahbazian & Nenad Medvidovic

    2. Institute for Software Research, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

      Joshua Garcia

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    1. Pooyan Behnamghader
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    2. Duc Minh Le
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    3. Joshua Garcia
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    4. Arman Shahbazian
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    5. Nenad Medvidovic
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    Corresponding author

    Correspondence to Pooyan Behnamghader.

    Additional information

    Communicated by: Romain Robbes, Martin Pinzger and Yasutaka Kamei

    Pooyan Behnamghader and Duc Minh Le contributed equally to this work.

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    Behnamghader, P., Le, D.M., Garcia, J. et al. A large-scale study of architectural evolution in open-source software systems. Empir Software Eng 22, 1146–1193 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-016-9466-0

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