A Study on the Role of Software Architecture in the Evolution and Quality of Software

Conventional wisdom suggests that a software system´s architecture has a significant impact on its evolution. Prior research has studied the evolution of software using the information of how its files have changed together in their revision history. No prior study, however, has investigated the impact of architecture on the evolution of software from its change history. This is mainly because most open-source software systems do not document their architectures. We have overcome this challenge using several architecture recovery techniques. We used the recovered models to examine if co-changes spanning multiple architecture modules are more likely to introduce bugs than co-changes that are within modules. The results show that the co-changes that cross architectural module boundaries are more correlated with defects than co-changes within modules, implying that, to improve accuracy, bug predictors should also take the software architecture of the system into consideration.