Change impact analysis for object-oriented programs

Abstract

Small changes can have major and nonlocal effects in objectoriented languages, due to the use of subtyping and dynamic dispatch. This complicates life for maintenance programmers, who need to fix bugs or add enhancements to systems originally written by others. Change impact analysis provides feedback on the semantic impact of a set of program changes. This analysis can be used to determine the regression test drivers that are affected by a set of changes. Moreover, if a test fails, a subset of changes responsible for the failure can be identified, as well as a subset of changes that can be incorporated safely without affecting any test driver.

On the Impact Significance of Metamodel Evolution in MDE.

“…The authors in [RT01] propose a change impact analysis for Object-Oriented programs. This work provides feedback on the semantic impact of a set of program changes.…”

Systems Evolution and Software Reuse in Object-Oriented Programming and Aspect-Oriented Programming

“…The evolution metric we use is based on previous studies performed by Zhang et al. [40] and Ryder & Tip [32]. In their work, the difficulty of evolvability is defined in terms of atomic changes to the modules in a program.…”

“…Evolvability and reusability like other quality factors are difficult to measure. Our dependent variables are based on previous studies performed by Zhang et al [40], Ryder & Tip [32] and Frakes [12]. It is possible that other metrics will be better fitted for the purpose of our study.…”

On Differencing Object-Oriented Formal Specifications.

“…Finally, in [15] an approach is proposed to perform a change impact analysis on OO programs. Source code edit operations are transformed into a set of atomic changes.…”

“…similarity scoring < 1) then there is a possibility that their contents (other than names) have been modified, new links have been attached to them or that some of their links have been removed. The algorithm addresses this by detecting the changed properties other than names and adding them to delta (line [13][14][15][16][17][18] 2 of type "derived_from", "aggregated_by" or "associated_with" connects it to a new class B and a link k 1 of the same type with an old class A is removed. A function updateMoving is used to perform the above verification; it accepts a delta containing a list of operations and a specification element E as parameters and returns an object containing the two elements representing the old and new link ends or a "null" object if no moving has taken place.…”