Software systems are a typical kind of man-made complex systems. Understanding their evolutions can lead to better software engineering practices. In this paper, the authors use complex network theory as a tool to ana...Software systems are a typical kind of man-made complex systems. Understanding their evolutions can lead to better software engineering practices. In this paper, the authors use complex network theory as a tool to analyze the evolution of object-oriented （OO） software from a multi-granularity perspective. First, a multi-granularity software networks model is proposed to represent the topological structures of a multi-version software system from three levels of granularity. Then, some parameters widely used in complex network theory are applied to characterize the software networks. By tracing the parameters＇ values in consecutive software systems, we have a better understanding about software evolution. A case study is conducted on an open source OO project, Azureus, as an example to illustrate our approach, and some underlying evolution characteristics are uncovered. These results provide a different dimension to our understanding of software evolutions and also are very useful for the design and development of OO software systems.展开更多
基金This research is supported by the National Basic Research 973 Program of China under Grant No 2007CB310801, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 60873083 and 61003073 the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China under Grant No. 20090141120022 the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China under Grant Nos. 114013 and 6082005 and the Scientific Research Fund of Zhejiang Provincial Education Department under Grant No. Y201018008.
文摘Software systems are a typical kind of man-made complex systems. Understanding their evolutions can lead to better software engineering practices. In this paper, the authors use complex network theory as a tool to analyze the evolution of object-oriented （OO） software from a multi-granularity perspective. First, a multi-granularity software networks model is proposed to represent the topological structures of a multi-version software system from three levels of granularity. Then, some parameters widely used in complex network theory are applied to characterize the software networks. By tracing the parameters＇ values in consecutive software systems, we have a better understanding about software evolution. A case study is conducted on an open source OO project, Azureus, as an example to illustrate our approach, and some underlying evolution characteristics are uncovered. These results provide a different dimension to our understanding of software evolutions and also are very useful for the design and development of OO software systems.
