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In modern software engineering, researchers regard a software system as an organic life form that must continue to evolve to remain successful. Unfortunately, little is known about how successful software systems have evolved, and consequently little has been learned from previous experience. We demonstrate a heuristic to reconstruct evolution processes of existing software systems by exploiting techniques to detect duplication in large amounts of data. A case study, evaluating various versions of Tomcat using this heuristic, revealed that the removal of duplicated code is a much smaller concern than grouping functionality in classes with one clear responsibility.
Rysselberghe et al. (Tue,) studied this question.