The impact of software evolution on code coverage information

Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance. ICSM 2001 Pub Date : 2001-11-07 DOI:10.1109/ICSM.2001.972727

Sebastian G. Elbaum, D. Gable, G. Rothermel

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引用次数: 82

Abstract

Many tools and techniques for addressing software maintenance problems rely on code coverage information. Often, this coverage information is gathered for a specific version of a software system, and then used to perform analyses on subsequent versions of that system without being recalculated. As a software system evolves, however, modifications to the software alter the software's behavior on particular inputs, and code coverage information gathered on earlier versions of a program may not accurately reflect the coverage that would be obtained on later versions. This discrepancy may affect the success of analyses dependent on code coverage information. Despite the importance of coverage information in various analyses, in our search of the literature we find no studies specifically examining the impact of software evolution on code coverage information. Therefore, we conducted empirical studies to examine this impact. The results of our studies suggest that even relatively small modifications can greatly affect code coverage information, and that the degree of impact of change on coverage may be difficult to predict.

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软件演化对代码覆盖信息的影响

许多解决软件维护问题的工具和技术都依赖于代码覆盖信息。通常，这些覆盖信息是为软件系统的特定版本收集的，然后用于对该系统的后续版本执行分析，而不需要重新计算。然而，随着软件系统的发展，对软件的修改改变了软件在特定输入上的行为，并且在程序的早期版本上收集的代码覆盖信息可能不能准确地反映将在后来的版本上获得的覆盖。这种差异可能会影响依赖于代码覆盖信息的分析的成功。尽管覆盖率信息在各种分析中都很重要，但是在我们的文献搜索中，我们发现没有研究专门检查软件进化对代码覆盖率信息的影响。因此，我们进行了实证研究来检验这种影响。我们的研究结果表明，即使是相对较小的修改也会极大地影响代码覆盖率信息，并且变更对覆盖率的影响程度可能很难预测。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance. ICSM 2001

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