thesis - Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies ...

Contents
6.2.1 Probability of Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
6.2.2 Rate of Modification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
6.2.3 Distribution of the Amount of Change . . . . . . . . 155
6.2.4 Modified Classes and Popularity . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
6.2.5 Modification Probability and In-Degree Count . . . . 159
6.2.6 Popularity of New Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
6.2.7 Structural Complexity of Modified Classes . . . . . . 162
6.2.8 Summary of Observations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
6.3 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
6.3.1 Probability of Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
6.3.2 Rate and Distribution of Change . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
6.3.3 Popularity of Modified Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
6.3.4 Popularity of New Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
6.3.5 Complexity of Modified Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
6.3.6 Development Strategy and its Impact on Change . . 171
6.4 Related work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
6.5 Limitations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
6.6 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
7 Implications 181
7.1 Laws of Software Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
7.2 Software Development Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
7.2.1 Project Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
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