%0 Journal Article %1 girba06 %A Gîrba, Tudor %A Ducasse, Stéphane %D 2006 %J Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice %K evolution modeling software visualization %N 3 %P 207-236 %T Modeling history to analyze software evolution %U http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/smr.325 %V 18 %X The histories of software systems hold useful information when reasoning about the systems at hand or when reasoning about general laws of software evolution. Over the past 30 years, research has been increasingly spent on understanding software evolution. However, the approaches developed so far do not rely on an explicit meta-model and, thus, they make it difficult to reuse or compare their results. We argue that there is a need for an explicit meta-model for software evolution analysis. We present a survey of the evolution analyses and deduce a set of requirements that an evolution meta-model should have. We define Hismo, a meta-model in which history is modeled as an explicit entity. Hismo adds a time layer on top of structural information, and provides a common infrastructure for expressing and combining evolution analyses and structural analyses. We validate the usefulness of our meta-model by presenting how different analyses are expressed on it.

@article{girba06, abstract = {The histories of software systems hold useful information when reasoning about the systems at hand or when reasoning about general laws of software evolution. Over the past 30 years, research has been increasingly spent on understanding software evolution. However, the approaches developed so far do not rely on an explicit meta-model and, thus, they make it difficult to reuse or compare their results. We argue that there is a need for an explicit meta-model for software evolution analysis. We present a survey of the evolution analyses and deduce a set of requirements that an evolution meta-model should have. We define Hismo, a meta-model in which history is modeled as an explicit entity. Hismo adds a time layer on top of structural information, and provides a common infrastructure for expressing and combining evolution analyses and structural analyses. We validate the usefulness of our meta-model by presenting how different analyses are expressed on it.}, added-at = {2008-01-03T22:46:20.000+0100}, author = {Gîrba, Tudor and Ducasse, Stéphane}, biburl = {https://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/2737aeaee273faae15b9029dcfd0ea790/neilernst}, date = {2007-01-11}, description = {Presents a meta-model of software evolution, little focus on requirements}, ee = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/smr.325}, interhash = {6aad9a34935d8a29f9203159d0bc513b}, intrahash = {737aeaee273faae15b9029dcfd0ea790}, journal = {Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice}, keywords = {evolution modeling software visualization}, number = 3, pages = {207-236}, timestamp = {2008-01-03T22:46:20.000+0100}, title = {Modeling history to analyze software evolution}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/smr.325}, volume = 18, year = 2006 }