Analyzing the evolutionary history of the logical design of object-oriented software
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Today, most object-oriented software systems are developed using an evolutionary process model. Therefore, understanding the phases that the system's logical design has gone through and the style of their evolution can provide valuable insights in support of consistently maintaining and evolving the system, without compromising the integrity and stability of its architecture. In this paper, we present a method for analyzing the evolution of object-oriented software systems from the point of view of their logical design. This method relies on UMLDiff, a UML-structure differencing algorithm, which, given a sequence of UML class models corresponding to the logical design of a sequence of system code releases, produces a sequence of "change records" that describe the design-level changes between subsequent system releases. This change-records sequence is subsequently analyzed from the perspective of each individual system class, to produce the class-evolution profile, i.e., a class-specific change-records' sequence. Three types of longitudinal analyses - phasic, gamma, and optimal matching analysis - are applied to the class-evolution profiles to recover a high-level abstraction of distinct evolutionary phases and their corresponding styles and to identify class clusters with similar evolution trajectories. The recovered knowledge facilitates the overall understanding of system evolution and the planning of future maintenance activities. We report on one real-world case study evaluating our approach.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".