Abstract
After a software system has been delivered, it inevitably has to change to remain useful. Evolutionary coupling measures the change dependencies between software components. Reference coupling measures the architecture dependencies between software components. In this paper, we present a method to correlate evolutionary coupling and reference coupling. We study the evolution of 597 consecutive versions of Linux and measure the evolutionary coupling and reference coupling among 12 kernel modules. We compare 12 pairs of evolutionary coupling data and reference coupling data. The results show that linear correlation exists between evolutionary coupling and reference coupling. We conclude that in Linux, the dependencies between software components induced via the system architecture have noticeable effects on kernel module co-evolution.
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Notes
In other research, this is called confidence. To avoid the confusion with the confidence used in statistics we use support ratio in this paper.
In this paper, we only consider the direct co-evolution of two components. We ignore the co-evolution of two components as the result of their common dependencies on a third component.
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The author would like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on an earlier version of this paper.
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Yu, L. Understanding component co-evolution with a study on Linux. Empir Software Eng 12, 123–141 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-006-9000-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-006-9000-x