How does Software Change?

TL;DR

This paper develops a theory of software change based on empirical evidence from GitHub, explaining how project governance, people, and ecosystem influence software evolution decisions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel theory of software change grounded in empirical data, linking project concepts and ecosystem factors to change decisions.

Findings

Software change is influenced by project governance and ecosystem factors.

Empirical evidence from GitHub supports the proposed theory.

The theory explains decision-making processes in software evolution.

Abstract

Software evolves with changes to its codebase over time. Internally, software changes in response to decisions to include some code change into the codebase and discard others. Explaining the mechanism of software evolution, this paper presents a theory of software change. Our theory is grounded in multiple evidence sources (e.g., GitHub documentation and relevant scientific literature) relating to the pull-based development model in GitHub. The resulting theory explains the influence of project-related core concepts (e.g., people and governance) as well as its ecosystem on the decision of software change.