thesis - Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies ...

Chapter 1. Introduction
undergo continuing change or become progressively less useful.” Another
implication of our findings is that designers need to consider with
care both the internal structural complexity as well as the popularity
of a class. Specifically, components that are designed for reuse, should
also be designed to be flexible since they are likely to be change-prone.
1.4 Thesis Organisation
This thesis is organised into a set of chapters, followed by an Appendix.
The raw metric data used in our study as well as the tools used are
included in a DVD attached to the thesis.
Chapter 2 - Software Evolution provides an overview of prior research
in the field of software evolution and motivates our own work.
Chapter 3 - Data Selection Methodology explains our input data selection
criteria and the data corpus selected for our study. We discuss
the various types of histories that can be used as an input for studying
evolution of a software system and provide a rationale for the history
that we select for analysis.
Chapter 4 - Measuring Evolving Software explains the metric extraction
process and provides a discussion of the metrics we collect from
the Java software systems and provide appropriate motivation for our
choices.
Chapter 5 - Growth Dynamics deals with how size and complexity
distributions change as systems evolve. We discuss an novel analysis
technique that effectively summarises the distributions and discuss
our findings.
Chapter 6 - Change Dynamics deals with how classes change. We
present our technique for detecting change, identify typical patterns of
change and provide additional interpretation to the results found in our
growth analysis.
Chapter 7 - Implications outlines the implications arising from the
findings described in Chapter 5 and Chapter 6.
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