Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Characterizing And Diagnosing Architectural Degeneration Of Software Systems From Defect Perspective, Zude Li

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The architecture of a software system is known to degrade as the system evolves over time due to change upon change, a phenomenon that is termed architectural degeneration. Previous research has focused largely on structural "deviations" of an architecture from its baseline. However, another angle to observe architectural degeneration is software defects, especially those that are architecturally related. Such an angle has not been scientifically explored until now. Here, we ask two relevant questions: (1) What do defects indicate about architectural degeneration? and (2) How can architectural degeneration be diagnosed from the defect perspective? To answer question (1), we conducted …