Studying Software Evolution for Taming Software Complexity

—Reducing software complexity is key to reducing software maintenance costs. To discover complexity-reducing practices, in this paper we study the evolution of seven sizable open source programs over a long period of time. We first measure how software complexity changes as programs evolve, and identify complexity-reducing releases. We then study the changes introduced in these releases and extract evolution patterns (we call them complexity-reducing steps) that lead to reduced program complexity. Finally, we categorize these steps and discuss their effectiveness. We believe that bringing these complexity-reducing measures to light, and encouraging developers to adopt them, has the potential to improve the state of practice in software maintenance. Keywords-software complexity, software evolution, software metrics, open source, refactoring

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ASWEC
• Authors: Steve D. Suh, Iulian Neamtiu
• Keywords: ASWEC 2010, Software, Software Complexity, Software Engineering, Software Maintenance