Software developers must produce software that can be changed without the risk of degrading the software architecture. One way to address software changes is to classify their causes and effects. A software change classification mechanism allows engineers to develop a common approach for handling changes. This information can be used to show the potential impact of the change. The goal of this research is to develop a change classification scheme that can be used to address causes of architectural degradation. This scheme can be used to model the effects of changes to software architecture. This research also presents a study of the initial architecture change classification scheme. The results of the study indicated that the classification scheme was easy to use and provided some benefit to developers. In addition, the results provided some evidence that changes of different types (in this classification scheme) required different amounts of effort to implement.