Information and Software Technology
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Software architects regularly have to identify weaknesses in the structure of software systems. Groups of software entities which frequently changed together in the past are one way to help find such structural weaknesses. However, there may be many such groups. Not all of them point to structural weaknesses and even fewer indicate severe issues. In this paper we discuss how a multi-dimensional characterization of evolutionary clusters can help identify severe structural weaknesses. In addressing this question we describe (1) properties used for characterizing evolutionary clusters, (2) scenarios characterizing severe structural issues, and (3) the mapping of such scenarios to queries on a set of evolutionary clusters, resulting in a subset denoting severe structural issues according to that scenario. We apply the proposed characterization to the case of a large embedded software system having a development history of more than a decade.