TY - GEN
T1 - On the interplay between structural and logical dependencies in open-source software
AU - Oliva, Gustavo Ansaldi
AU - Gerosa, Marco Aurélio
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - Structural dependencies have long been explored in the context of software quality. More recently, software evolution researchers have investigated logical dependencies between artifacts to assess failure-proneness, detect design issues, infer code decay, and predict likely changes. However, the interplay between these two kinds of dependencies is still obscure. By mining 150 thousand commits from the Apache Software Foundation repository and employing object-oriented metrics reference values, we concluded that 91% of all established logical dependencies involve non-structurally related artifacts. Furthermore, we found some evidence that structural dependencies do not lead to logical dependencies in most situations. These results suggest that dependency management methods and tools should rely on both kinds of dependencies, since they represent different dimensions of software evolvability.
AB - Structural dependencies have long been explored in the context of software quality. More recently, software evolution researchers have investigated logical dependencies between artifacts to assess failure-proneness, detect design issues, infer code decay, and predict likely changes. However, the interplay between these two kinds of dependencies is still obscure. By mining 150 thousand commits from the Apache Software Foundation repository and employing object-oriented metrics reference values, we concluded that 91% of all established logical dependencies involve non-structurally related artifacts. Furthermore, we found some evidence that structural dependencies do not lead to logical dependencies in most situations. These results suggest that dependency management methods and tools should rely on both kinds of dependencies, since they represent different dimensions of software evolvability.
KW - dependency management
KW - logical coupling
KW - logical dependencies
KW - mining software repositories
KW - software evolution
KW - structural analysis
KW - structural coupling
KW - structural dependencies
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=82255172009&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=82255172009&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/SBES.2011.39
DO - 10.1109/SBES.2011.39
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:82255172009
SN - 9780769546032
T3 - Proceedings - 25th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, SBES 2011
SP - 144
EP - 153
BT - Proceedings - 25th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, SBES 2011
T2 - 25th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, SBES 2011
Y2 - 28 September 2011 through 30 September 2011
ER -