An Empirical Comparison of Dynamic Impact Analysis Algorithms

Impact analysis determining the potential effects of changes on a software system plays an important role in software engineering tasks such as maintenance, regression testing, and debugging. In previous work, two new dynamic impact analysis techniques, Coverage Impact and Path Impact, were presente...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International Conference on Software Engineering: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering; 23-28 May 2004 pp. 491 - 500
Main Authors: Orso, Alessandro, Apiwattanapong, Taweesup, Law, James, Rothermel, Gregg, Harrold, Mary Jean
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: Washington, DC, USA IEEE Computer Society 23.05.2004
Series:ACM Conferences
Subjects:
Applied sciences
Computer science; control theory; systems
Exact sciences and technology
Software
Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software post-development issues > Software reverse engineering
Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software verification and validation > Software defect analysis > Software testing and debugging
Software and its engineering > Software notations and tools > Software configuration management and version control systems
Software engineering
Theory of computation > Logic > Programming logic
Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning > Program reasoning
Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning > Program reasoning > Program analysis
Theory of computation > Semantics and reasoning > Program semantics
Data analysis
Software development
Debugging
Empirical method
Data field
Maintenance
Algorithm analysis
Program behavior
Software engineering
ISBN:9780769521633, 0769521630
ISSN:0270-5257
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Impact analysis determining the potential effects of changes on a software system plays an important role in software engineering tasks such as maintenance, regression testing, and debugging. In previous work, two new dynamic impact analysis techniques, Coverage Impact and Path Impact, were presented. These techniques perform impact analysis based on data gathered about program behavior relative to specific inputs, such as inputs gathered from field data, operational profile data, or test-suite executions.Due to various characteristics of the algorithms they employ, Coverage Impact and Path Impact are expected to differ in terms of cost and precision; however, there have been no studies to date examining the extent to which such differences may emerge in practice. Since cost-precision trade offs may play an important role in technique selection and further research, we wished to examine these trade offs.We therefore designed and performed an empirical study,comparing the execution and space costs of the techniques,as well as the precisions of the impact analysis results that they report. This paper presents the results of this study.
Bibliography:SourceType-Conference Papers & Proceedings-1
ObjectType-Conference Paper-1
content type line 25
ISBN:9780769521633
0769521630
ISSN:0270-5257
DOI:10.5555/998675.999453