Measuring disruption from software evolution activities using graph-based metrics

In this paper, we investigate how class relationships are disrupted after large scale changes. We use graphs to represent different software versions and study changes to graph properties. We explore different combinatorial metrics to measure the extent of disruption after perfective maintenance activities. Our early results, on JHotDraw, demonstrate that combinatorial metrics can provide a good indicator to the degree to which relationships are disrupted or preserved across different versions.