Characterizing Software Architecture Changes: An Initial Study

With today's ever increasing demands on software, developers must produce software that can be changed without the risk of degrading the software architecture. Degraded software architecture is problematic because it makes the system more prone to defects and increases the cost of making future changes. The effects of making changes to software can be difficult to measure. One way to address software changes is to characterize their causes and effects. This paper introduces an initial architecture change characterization scheme created to assist developers in measuring the impact of a change on the architecture of the system. It also presents an initial study conducted to gain insight into the validity of the scheme. The results of this study indicated a favorable view of the viability of the scheme by the subjects, and the scheme increased the ability of novice developers to assess and adequately estimate change effort.