ADvISE: Architectural Decay in Software Evolution

Software systems evolve continuously, requiring continuous maintenance and development. Consequently, their architecture tends to degrade with time as it becomes less relevant to new, emerging requirements. Therefore, stability or resilience is a primary criterion for evaluating an architecture. In this paper, we propose a quantitative approach to study the evolution of the architecture of object oriented systems over time. In particular, we represent an architecture as a set of triplets (S, R, T), where S and T represent two classes and R is a relationship linking them. We use these triplets as basic unit to measure the stability of an architecture. We show the applicability and usefulness of our approach by studying the evolution of three open source systems: JFree Chart and Xerces-J and Rhino.