Analyzing the instability of the core components of software projects

Abstract

Open source software projects represent a significant source of existing pieces of software to be identified and used to implement new or emerging requirements. However, the high complexity of the existing software systems makes difficult the identification of software components to be reused in other systems and the evaluation of their quality. This paper proposes an approach aiming at identifying the core components of a software system and proposing and evaluating some metrics for measuring the evolution of their architecture instability across multiple releases. Then, the paper analyses how the architecture of core components of a software system evolves respect to the whole system. It also investigates the different factors influencing the instability of the core components and it verifies if it decreases across multiple releases assumed that this is a good indication that they can constitute a good candidate to be reused.