Software systems generally involve a number of phases and tend to evolve over a period of time. Several revisions of individual artifacts which make up the system take place during the evolution process. The revisions and refinements are captured and maintained as different versions using configuration/version management tools. A key issue in the version management of object oriented software system is classification of attributes of an artifact into two categories namely versioning and non-versioning which determines the major and minor functionalities, respectively, of the artifact. In this paper we propose an algorithm for automating the process of above classification. The results of classification are used to predict the type of change as version change or equivalent change required to be made in the related artifacts at the time of evolution due to change propagation. A semantic entity called Unified Representation of an Artifact (URA) is used for representing the artifacts in the software system. The object oriented issues like inheritance, aggregation and association, are also considered for propagating a change in the software system. The role of accessibility of attributes such as private, public and protected in version management is also considered.