The Hybrid Technique for Object-Oriented Software Change Impact Analysis

Abstract

Change impact analysis techniques that underestimate impact may cause important financial losses from the point of view of an IT services company. Thus, reducing false-negatives in these techniques is a goal with strong practical relevance. This work presents a technique that uses both static and dynamic analysis of object-oriented source code to improve resulting impact estimates in terms of recall. The technique consists of three steps: static analysis to identify structural dependencies between code entities, dynamic analysis to identify dependencies based on a succession relation derived from execution traces, and a ranking of results from both analyses that takes into account the relevance of dynamic dependencies. Evaluation was performed through prototype development and a multiple-case quantitative case study that compared our solution against a static technique and a dynamic one. Results showed that our hybrid technique improved recall between 90 and 115% compared to the static technique, and between 21.2 and 39% compared to the dynamic one.