A Prediction Method for Evolution Effects of Software Architecture

Software architecture evolution may lead to architecture erosion, resulting in the increase of software maintenance cost, the deterioration of software quality, the decline of software performance, and so on. In order to avoid software architecture erosion, we should evaluate the evolution effect of software architecture in time. This paper proposes a prediction method for the evolution effects of software architecture based on BP network. Firstly, this method proposes four evolution principles and evaluates the overall evolution effects based on the combined measurements. Then, we extract the evolutionary activities from release notes. Finally, we establish a prediction model for evolution effect based on BP network. Experimental results show that the proposed method can be used to predict the evolution effect.