Properties of Signature Change Patterns

Abstract

Understanding function signature change properties and evolution patterns is important for researchers concerned with alleviating signature change impacts, understanding software evolution, and predicting future evolution patterns. We provide detailed signature change properties by analyzing seven software project histories to reveal multiple properties of signature changes, including their kind, frequency, correlation with other changes, number of parameter changes, and evolution patterns of signature change kinds. We show that signature changes can be used as measurement aid for software evolution analysis