Co-evolving code-related and database-related changes in a data-intensive software system

Abstract

Current empirical studies on the evolution of software systems are primarily analysing source code. Sometimes, social aspects such as the activity of contributors are considered as well. Very few studies, however, focus on data-intensive software systems (DISS), in which a significant part of the total development effort is devoted to maintaining and evolving the database schema. We report on early results obtained in the empirical analysis of the co-evolution between code-related and database-related activities in a large open source DISS. As a case study, we have analysed OSCAR, for which the historical information spanning many years is available in a Git repository.