Graph-based implicit knowledge discovery from architecture change logs

Ahmad, Aakash and Jamshidi, Pooyan and Arshad, Muteer and Pahl, Claus (2012) Graph-based implicit knowledge discovery from architecture change logs. In: Joint 10th Working Conference on Software Architecture, WICSA 2012 and 6th European Conference on Software Architecture, ECSA 2012 - Proceedings Companion Volume :. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series . The Association for Computing Machinery, FIN, pp. 116-123. ISBN 9781450315685

Abstract

Service architectures continuously evolve as a consequence of frequent business and technical change cycles. Architecture change log data represents a source of evolution-centric information in terms of intent, scope and operationalisation to accommodate changing requirements in existing architecture. We investigate change logs in order to analyse operational representation of architecture change instances to discover an implicit evolution-centric knowledge that have been aggregating over time. Change instances from the log are formalised as a typed attributed graph with its node and edge attribution capturing change representation on architecture elements. We exploit graph matching as a knowledge discovery technique in order to i) analyse change operationalisation and its dependencies for ii) discovering recurrent change sequences in the log. We identify potentially reusable, usage-determined change patterns.