Network Motifs in Object-Oriented Software Systems

Abstract: Nowadays, software has become a complex piece of work that may be beyond our control. Understanding how software evolves over time plays an important role in controlling software development processes. Recently, a few researchers found the quantitative evidence of structural duplication in software systems or web applications, which is similar to the evolutionary trend found in biological systems. To investigate the principles or rules of software evolution, we introduce the relevant theories and methods of complex networks into structural evolution and change of software systems. According to the results of our experiment on network motifs, we find that the stability of a motif shows positive correlation with its abundance and a motif with high Z score tends to have stable structure. These findings imply that the evolution of software systems is based on functional cloning as well as structural duplication and tends to be structurally stable. So, the work presented in this paper will be useful for the analysis of structural changes of software systems in reverse engineering.