Experience Report on the Effect of Software Development Characteristics on Change Distribution

  • Authors:

  • Anita Gupta;Reidar Conradi;Forrest Shull;Daniela Cruzes;Christopher Ackermann;Harald Rønneberg;Einar Landre

  • Affiliations:

  • Dep. of Computer and Information Science (IDI), Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway;Dep. of Computer and Information Science (IDI), Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway;Fraunhofer Center Maryland, College Park, USA;Fraunhofer Center Maryland, College Park, USA;Fraunhofer Center Maryland, College Park, USA;StatoilHydro ASA KTJ/IT, Forus,;StatoilHydro ASA KTJ/IT, Forus,

  • Venue:
  • PROFES '08 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

This paper reports on an industrial case study in a large Norwegian Oil and Gas company (StatoilHydro ASA) involving a reusable Java-class framework and an application that uses that framework. We analyzed software changes from three releases of the framework and the application. On the basis of our analysis of the data, we found that perfective and corrective changes account for the majority of changes in both the reusable framework and the non-reusable application. Although adaptive changes are more frequent and has longer active time in the reusable framework, it went through less refactoring compared to the non-reusable application. For the non-reusable application we saw preventive changes as more frequent and with longer active time. We also found that designing for reuse seems to lead to fewer changes, as well as we saw a positive effect on doing refactoring.