Tracking structural evolution using origin analysis

Many long term studies of software evolution have made the simplifying assumption that the system's architecture and low-level structure is relatively stable. In our past work, we have found that this is often untrue; therefore, we have sought to investigate ways to detect and model structural change in software systems through a technique we call origin analysis [6] and supported a tool called Beagle [7]. In this position paper, we present a summary of our recent and ongoing work in this area, and we argue that more attention needs to be paid to techniques for understanding architectural and structural evolution of software systems.