thesis - Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies ...

List of Figures
2.1 The process of evolution. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.2 The different types of growth rates observed in evolving
software systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.3 Illustration of the segmented growth in the Groovy language
compiler. The overall growth rate appears to be
super-linear, with two distinct sub-linear segments. . . . . 27
3.1 Component diagram of a typical software system in our
study. Only the Core System JAR components (highlighted
in the image) are investigated and used for the metric extraction
process. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
4.1 UML Class diagram of evolution history model. . . . . . . . 66
4.2 Time intervals (measured in days) between releases is erratic.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
4.3 Cumulative distribution showing the number of releases
over the time interval between releases. . . . . . . . . . . . 70
4.4 Age is calculated in terms of the days elapsed since first
release. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
4.5 The metric extraction process for each release of a software
system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
4.6 The dependency graph that is constructed includes classes
from the core, external libraries and the Java framework.
The two sets, N and K, used in our dependency graph processing
are highlighted in the figure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
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