Effect of software evolution on software metrics

Johari, Kalpana; Kaur, Amandeep

doi:10.1145/2020976.2020987

Cited by 19 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…A plethora of previous work focused on the evolution of desktop applications (e.g., [4][5][6]). However, to the best of our knowledge, there have not been any studies that examine the applicability of Lehman's laws on mobile applications.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The evolution of mobile apps: an exploratory study

Zhang

Sagar

Shihab

2013

Proceedings of the 2013 International Workshop on Software Development Lifecycle for Mobile

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As mobile apps continue to grow in popularity, it is important to study their evolution. Lehman's laws of software evolution have been proposed and used to study the evolution of traditional, large software systems (also known as desktop apps). However, do Lehman's laws of software evolution hold for mobile apps?, especially since developing mobile apps presents different challenges compared to the development of desktop apps.In this paper, we examine the applicability of three of Lehman's laws on mobile apps. In particular, we focused on three laws: the law of continuing change, increasing complexity, and declining quality. We extracted a number of metrics and performed a case study on two applications: VLC and ownCloud. Our findings show that the law of continuing change and declining quality seem to apply for mobile apps, however, we find different outcomes for the law of increasing complexity. Then, we compare the mobile app version to the desktop version and find that the two versions follow the same trends for the law of continuing change. On the contrary, the desktop and mobile version have different trends for the law of increasing complexity and the law of declining quality.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The evolution of mobile apps: an exploratory study

Zhang

Sagar

Shihab

2013

Proceedings of the 2013 International Workshop on Software Development Lifecycle for Mobile

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“…Currently major analysis tools for object‐oriented software are Semmle, Dependency Finder, Analyst4j, and Chidamber and Kemerer Java Metrics, and Eclipse Metrics Plugin, OOMeter, JDepend, and Understand for Java tools. By comparing the characteristics and constraints of the different metrics tools, we choose Eclipse Metrics Plugin 1.3.6 and JDepend .…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Just as Darwin's theory of evolution states, biology evolves constantly with the changing environment; software is also changing all the time. Previous studies have proposed a variety of software metrics; Lehman used number of modules handled in each release. Kemerer used cumulative commit changes in their empirical approach, while Paulson used function modifications and complexity; Godfrey used system and module size in his Linux case study.…”

Section: Evolution Of the Mobile Appsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The evolution of open-source mobile applications: An empirical study

Guo

Shen

et al. 2017

J Softw Evol Proc

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Now, mobile applications grow at an exponential speed and their evolution activities are very active, while there is little research on the evolution of mobile apps. To have a better understanding of the evolution of mobile apps and find similarities or patterns in their evolution process, we conduct an empirical study on long spans in the lifetime of 8 typical open‐source mobile apps, which covers 348 official releases. First, we try to verify whether Lehman's laws still apply to mobile apps or not, extract a variety of metrics of the apps, and use statistical hypothesis testing to validate these laws. We find enough data that support a subset of Lehman's laws, while the rest do not. Second, we make some novel observations, eg, the growth of mobile apps is nonsmooth, and some versions of the apps have a great growth in their evolution. Enough data confirming that software instability increases great with the addition of third‐party method invocations, and automatic build and manage tool based on contract is introduced into project as apps continue evolving.

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“…Also, [20] and [21] used JHotDraw as a benchmark test suite in their research work. In addition, [8] used JHD as one of the test suites in his project.…”

Section: Test Program (Jhotdraw)mentioning

confidence: 99%