On the Evolution Complexity of Design Patterns

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.

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