Change Prediction in Object-Oriented Software Systems: A Probabilistic Approach

An estimation of change-proneness of parts of a software system is an active topic in the area of software engineering. Such estimates can be used to predict changes to different classes of a system from one release to the next. They can also be used to estimate and possibly reduce the effort required during the development and maintenance phase by balancing the amount of developers' time assigned to each part of a software system. This research work proposes a novel approach to predict changes in an object-oriented software system. The rationale behind this approach is that in a well-designed software system, feature enhancement or corrective maintenance should affect a limited amount of existing code.