Modeling History to Analyze Software Evolution

Gîrba, Tudor; Ducasse, Stéphane (2006). Modeling History to Analyze Software Evolution. Journal of software maintenance and evolution - research and practice, 18, pp. 207-236. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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The histories of software systems hold useful information when reasoning about the systems at hand or when reasoning about general laws of software evolution. Over the past 30 years more and more research has been spent on understanding software evolution. However, the approaches developed so far do not rely on an explicit meta-model, and thus, they make it difficult to reuse or compare their results. We argue that there is a need for an explicit meta-model for software evolution analysis. We present a survey of the evolution analyses and deduce a set of requirements that an evolution meta-model should have. We define, Hismo, a meta-model in which history is modeled as an explicit entity. Hismo adds a time layer on top of structural information, and provides a common infrastructure for expressing and combining evolution analyses and structural analyses. We validate the usefulness of our a meta-model by presenting how different analyses are expressed on it.

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