Context Design problems have been recognized as one of the main causes behind the loss of software systems’ quality. Agglomerated design problems impact the quality even more. So, organizing and analyzing the relationship between design problems and concerns as agglomerations is a possible way to enhance the identification of defective source code artifacts. Problem As different systems evolve in varied manners, it is important to analyze if the evolution of agglomerated design problems can reveal cases of discrepancies and inconstancies through time. We call these cases non-uniformity of agglomerations, and they can prevent the use of agglomerations in approaches to mitigate design problems (e.g., prediction models). To the best of our knowledge, we consider that this problem has not been investigated yet. Goal This study aims to comprehend the degree to which the non-uniformity of agglomerations is either the most common or the most exceptional situation during the evolution of software projects. We perform this investigation by grouping software projects under two transverse dimensions: types and domains of software. Method To this end, we performed a two-phase investigation: in phase I, we analyzed the historical data obtained from fifteen software projects split as three groups of types of software (distributed, service-oriented, and mobile projects); in phase II, we analyzed the evolution of six projects grouped as two domains of software (graph and timeseries databases). For each phase, we (i) mined instances of a design problem (code complexity) and concerns from the source code of projects, (ii) agglomerated the instances of code complexity around the concerns and analyzed them according to the grouped projects, and (iii) examined the resulting dataset with the help of visualizations and a statistical analysis. Results/Discussion Types of software actually shows a tendency to reveal cases of non-uniformity. On the other hand, domains of software show a partial advantage regarding the production of more uniform agglomerations through evolution.

中文翻译：

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设计问题聚集与关注点之间的关系，将软件的类型和领域作为横向维度

上下文设计问题已被认为是导致软件系统质量下降的主要原因之一。聚集的设计问题对质量的影响更大。因此，将设计问题与关注点之间的关系组织和分析为聚集体，是增强缺陷源代码工件识别的一种可能方法。问题 由于不同的系统以不同的方式演进，分析聚集设计问题的演进是否可以揭示随着时间的推移出现差异和不一致的情况，这一点很重要。我们将这些情况称为聚集的非均匀性，它们可以防止在减轻设计问题的方法（例如，预测模型）中使用聚集。据我们所知，我们认为这个问题还没有被调查过。目标 本研究旨在了解在软件项目的演变过程中，聚集的非均匀性是最常见还是最例外的情况。我们通过在两个横向维度下对软件项目进行分组来进行这项调查：软件的类型和领域。方法 为此，我们进行了两个阶段的调查：在第一阶段，我们分析了从 15 个软件项目中获得的历史数据，将其划分为三组软件类型（分布式、面向服务和移动项目）；在第二阶段，我们分析了分为两个软件领域（图形和时间序列数据库）的六个项目的演变。对于每个阶段，我们 (i) 从项目的源代码中挖掘设计问题（代码复杂性）和关注点的实例，(ii) 围绕关注点聚集代码复​​杂性实例，并根据分组项目对其进行分析，以及 (iii) 在可视化和统计分析的帮助下检查生成的数据集。结果/讨论 软件类型实际上显示出揭示不均匀情况的趋势。另一方面，软件领域在通过进化产生更均匀的聚集方面显示出部分优势。