Understanding component co-evolution with a study on Linux

  • Authors:

  • Liguo Yu

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer and Information Sciences Department, Indiana University South Bend, South Bend, USA 46634

  • Venue:
  • Empirical Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

After a software system has been delivered, it inevitably has to change to remain useful. Evolutionary coupling measures the change dependencies between software components. Reference coupling measures the architecture dependencies between software components. In this paper, we present a method to correlate evolutionary coupling and reference coupling. We study the evolution of 597 consecutive versions of Linux and measure the evolutionary coupling and reference coupling among 12 kernel modules. We compare 12 pairs of evolutionary coupling data and reference coupling data. The results show that linear correlation exists between evolutionary coupling and reference coupling. We conclude that in Linux, the dependencies between software components induced via the system architecture have noticeable effects on kernel module co-evolution.