Software change dynamics: Evidence from 35 Java projects
Markus Michael Geipel and Frank Schweitzer
Proceedings of the the 7th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering (2009)
Abstract
In this paper we investigate the relationship between class dependency and change propagation in Java software. By analyzing 35 large Open Source Java projects, we find that in the majority of the projects more than half of the dependencies are never involved in change propagation. Furthermore, our analysis shows that only a few dependencies are transmitting the majority of change propagation events. An additional analysis reveals that this concentration cannot be explained by the different ages of the dependencies. The conclusion is that the dependency structure alone is a poor measure for the change dynamics. This contrasts with current literature.
