Software Stability: A Systematic Literature Review

Evolvability is the capability of a software product to be evolved to continue to serve its customers in a cost effective way. The term software evolution is closely related to maintenance, and evolvability is often used to mean maintainability or modifiability. When developing software architectures, evolvability is a desired quality attribute. It must be remembered that software architecture design is related to the proper consideration of quality attributes. Architectural decisions are made in order to fulfill, not only functional requirements, but also quality attributes. In order to design a software architecture that properly considers evolvability, Maccari and Galal have proposed an evolvability view which considers components stability. However, there is no guidance on how to obtain components stability. In order to propose a stability metric for architectural components, a systematic literature review (SLR) was performed. The intention of such a systematic literature review was to identify and evaluate available research about software stability. The results of the SRL are presented along with some proposals for further research.