Relationships between design problem agglomerations and concerns having types and domains of software as transverse dimensions

Abstract

Context Design problems have been recognized as one of the main causes behind the loss of software systems’ quality. Agglomerated design problems impact the quality even more. So, organizing and analyzing the relationship between design problems and concerns as agglomerations is a possible way to enhance the identification of defective source code artifacts. Problem As different systems evolve in varied manners, it is important to analyze if the evolution of agglomerated design problems can reveal cases of discrepancies and inconstancies through time. We call these cases non-uniformity of agglomerations, and they can prevent the use of agglomerations in approaches to mitigate design problems (e.g., prediction models). To the best of our knowledge, we consider that this problem has not been investigated yet. Goal This study aims to comprehend the degree to which the non-uniformity of agglomerations is either the most common or the most exceptional situation during the evolution of software projects. We perform this investigation by grouping software projects under two transverse dimensions: types and domains of software. Method To this end, we performed a two-phase investigation: in phase I, we analyzed the historical data obtained from fifteen software projects split as three groups of types of software (distributed, service-oriented, and mobile projects); in phase II, we analyzed the evolution of six projects grouped as two domains of software (graph and timeseries databases). For each phase, we (i) mined instances of a design problem (code complexity) and concerns from the source code of projects, (ii) agglomerated the instances of code complexity around the concerns and analyzed them according to the grouped projects, and (iii) examined the resulting dataset with the help of visualizations and a statistical analysis. Results/Discussion Types of software actually shows a tendency to reveal cases of non-uniformity. On the other hand, domains of software show a partial advantage regarding the production of more uniform agglomerations through evolution.