Trends in object-oriented software evolution: Investigating network properties

Abstract

The rise of social networks and the accompanying interest to study their evolution has stimulated a number of research efforts to analyze their growth patterns by means of network analysis. The inherent graph-like structure of object-oriented systems calls for the application of the corresponding methods and tools to analyze software evolution. In this paper we investigate network properties of two open-source systems and observe interesting phenomena regarding their growth. Relating the observed evolutionary trends to principles and laws of software design enables a highlevel assessment of tendencies in the underlying design quality.