Algorithmic Analysis of the Impacts of Changes to Object-Oriented Software

The research presented here addresses the problem of change impact analysis CIA for object-oriented software. A major problem for developers in an evolutionary environment is that seemingly small changes can ripple throughout the system to have major unintended impacts elsewhere. As a result, software developers need to understand how a change to a software system will a ect the rest of the system. Major results of this research include definitions for object-oriented data dependency graphs, a set of algorithms that allow software developers to evaluate proposed changes on object-oriented software, a set of object-oriented change impact metrics to quantitatively evaluate the change impacts, and a proof-of-concept tool ChAT that computes the impacts of changes. This research also supports e cient regression testing by helping testers decide what classes and methods need to be retested, and in supporting cost estimation and schedule planning.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: TOOLS
• Authors: Michelle Lee, A. Jefferson Offutt, Roger T. Alexander
• Keywords: Change Impacts, Object-oriented Software, Programming Languages, Software Developers, TOOLS 2000