Conceptual Framework for Software Change

Ever since the invention of software, change has been a destabilizing factor. Although many new software changes are being applied, the terminologies used to describe them are often inconsistent. This restricts practitioners to designing and evaluating their changes. This article aims to develop a conceptual framework of software change based on six main dimensions regarding the source, essence, and consequences of software change. To evaluate the proposed framework, benchmarking is applied against selected 11 previous studies.