A survey of software architectural change detection and categorization techniques

and knowledge, analyzing software stability, tracing and auditing software development history, recovering design decisions, generating design summary, and so on.In this paper, we survey state-of-the-art architectural change detection and categorization techniques and identify future research directions. To the best of our knowledge, our survey is the first comprehensive report on this area. However, in this survey, we compare available techniques using various quality attributes relevant to software architecture for different implementation levels and types. Moreover, our analysis shows that there is a lack of lightweight techniques (in terms of human intervention,