Tom Mens, Amnon H. Eden
Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, Vol. 127, No. 3, pp. 147–163. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier,
Publication year: 2004
Software co-evolution can be characterised as a way to “adjust” any given software implementation to a change (“shift”) in the software requirements. In this paper, we propose a formal definition of evolution complexity to precisely quantify the cost of adjusting a particular implementation to a change (“shift”) in the requirements. As a validation, we show that this definition formalises intuition about the evolvability of design patterns.

co-evolution-step