Scenarios for mining the software architecture evolution

• Authors: Yaojin Yang;Claudio Riva
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories
• Year: 2006

In this position paper, we introduce our latest activities on architecture evolution analysis through software repository mining. The traditional approaches for software repository mining provide means for analyzing source-level information. However, we believe that software repository mining can also provide valuable results for analyzing the system evolution at the architectural level.There are two challenges for analyzing the architecture evolution. The first one is to have in place a process for recovering the architectural models of the various releases. Architecture evolution is often visible only in the evolution of the implementation and this complicates the monitoring process. The second one is to have access to the past design models that were created by the architects during the design phase. A practical solutions for versioning the architectural models is not in use yet and this complicates the possibility of accessing the past design decisions.Analyzing architecture evolution through software repository mining represents the most promising choice. In order to conduct the analysis through software repository mining, we introduce our meta-model covering the design and implementation spaces. Then, we define a set of scenarios that demonstrate the architecturally significant analysis that we can conduct by mining the software repository.