Online impact analysis via dynamic compilation technology

Abstract

Dynamic impact analysis based on whole path profiling of method calls and returns has been shown to provide more useful predictions of software change impacts than method-level static slicing and to avoid the overhead of expensive dependency analysis needed for dynamic slicing-based impact analysis. This work presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of an online approach to dynamic impact analysis as an extension to the DynamoRIO binary code modification system and to the Jikes Research Virtual Machine. Storage and postmortem analysis of program traces, even compressed, are avoided.