TITLE:
IMPEX: An Approach to Analyze Source Code Changes on Software Run Behavior
AUTHORS:
David Nemer
KEYWORDS:
Change Impact; Change Prediction; Quality Assurance; Software Development
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications,
Vol.6 No.4,
April
25,
2013
ABSTRACT: The development of software nowadays
is getting more complex due to the need to use software programs to accomplish more elaborated tasks.
Developers may have a hard time knowing what could happen to the software when
making changes. To
support the developer in reducing the uncertainty of the impact on the software
run behavior due to changes in the source code, this paper presents a tool
called IMPEX which analyzes the differences in the source code and differences
on the run behavior of two subsequent software versions, in the entire
repository, demonstrating to the developer the impact that a change in the
source code has had on the software run, over the whole software history. This
impact helps the developers in knowing what is affected during execution due to
their changes in the source code. This study verifies that the software runs
that are most impacted by a given change in the source code, have higher
chances in being impacted in the future whenever this part of the code is
changed again. The approach taken in this paper was able to precisely predict
what would be impacted on the software execution when a change in the source
code was made in 70% of the cases.