Towards Automatic Assessment of Evolvability for 
Reusable Class Libraries






fuzzy logic


Many sources agree that managing the 
evolution of an OO system constitutes a 
complex and resource-consuming task. This is particularly 
for reusable class libraries as the user 
interface must be preserved to allow for 
version compatibility. Thus, the symptomatic detection of 
potential instability during the design phase of 
such libraries may serve to avoid later 
problems. This paper presents a fuzzy logic-based 
approach for evaluating the interface stability of 
a reusable class library by using structural 
metrics as stability indicators. To evaluate this 
new approach, we conducted a study on 
a set of commercial C++ class libraries. 
The obtained results are very promising when 
compared to those of classical approaches (machine 
leaning, statistics and Bayesian networks).