Assessing the impact of framework changes using component ranking

Most of today's software applications are built on top of libraries or frameworks. Just as applications evolve, libraries and frameworks also evolve. Upgrading is straightforward when the framework changes preserve the API and behavior of the offered services. However, in most cases, major changes are introduced with the new framework release, which can have a significant impact on the application. Hence, a common question a framework user might ask is, "Is it worth upgrading to the new framework version?" In this paper, we study the evolution of an application and its underlying framework to understand the information we can get through a multi-version use relation analysis. We use component rank changes to measure this impact. Component rank measurement is a way of quantifying the importance of a component by its usage. As framework components are used by applications, the rankings of the components are changed. We use component ranking to identify the core components...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICSM
• Authors: Reishi Yokomori, Harvey P. Siy, Masami Noro, Katsuro Inoue
• Keywords: Component Rank, Framework Version, ICSM 2009, Software Engineering, Upgrading