Measuring Software Architecture Stability Evolution in Object-Oriented Open Source Systems

摘要

Stability is the capability of a software artefact to stay intact while adapting to new changes and requirements. Software architecture demonstrates the structure of a software system which can be presented as software components and their interconnections. Measuring the stability of software architecture is an important endeavor that can help developers or project managers to make them aware about the situation of the software being developed. Many software metrics have been introduced to measure the stability of the software architecture. Some of these metrics measure software architecture at package-level while other ones measure it at class-level. The principal goal of this study is to come up with a new easy mechanism to measure the stability evolution in open source Java systems. Five different systems with ten versions are analyzed with respect to the new suggested mechanism of measuring stability evolution.