A modified Yule process to model the evolution of some object-oriented system properties

  • Authors:

  • I. Turnu;G. Concas;M. Marchesi;S. Pinna;R. Tonelli

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electric and Electronic Engineering, University of Cagliari, piazza d'Armi, Cagliari 09123, Italy;Department of Electric and Electronic Engineering, University of Cagliari, piazza d'Armi, Cagliari 09123, Italy;Department of Electric and Electronic Engineering, University of Cagliari, piazza d'Armi, Cagliari 09123, Italy;Department of Electric and Electronic Engineering, University of Cagliari, piazza d'Armi, Cagliari 09123, Italy;Department of Electric and Electronic Engineering, University of Cagliari, piazza d'Armi, Cagliari 09123, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Information Sciences: an International Journal
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We present a model based on the Yule process, able to explain the evolution of some properties of large object-oriented software systems. We study four system properties related to code production of four large object-oriented software systems - Eclipse, Netbeans, JDK and Ant. The properties analysed, namely the naming of variables and methods, the call to methods and the inheritance hierarchies, show a power-law distribution as reported in previous papers for different systems. We use the simulation approach to verify the goodness of our model, finding a very good correspondence between empirical data of subsequent software versions, and the prediction of the model presented.