Evaluation of Software Change Propagation Using Simulation

Software changes are inevitable in the process of software evolution. And software change propagation intensely increases the difficulty of software maintenance. The approach of simulated analysis is introduced to the research on software change propagation. The software change propagation model construction and related software metric indicators are presented. And the software change propagation evaluation approach based on simulation is proposed, which can be used to evaluate the design quality of software system in an arbitrary level of abstraction. The proposed software change propagation model has been implemented in the NetLogo simulation platform that can automatically analyze the software quality of a given system. The proposed systematic approach has been evaluated by some samples, which indicate the simplicity and rationality of our approach.