MASPLAS '07

Dynamic Modification Impact Analysis
Lulu Huang and Yeong-Tae Song


Dynamic impact analysis based on program executions has shown promise in aiding tasks in the life cycle of large-scale systems, especially in the areas of testing, debugging, and maintenance. Dynamic impact analysis techniques have shown to produce more precise results than static impact analysis [1]. However, current dynamic impact analysis techniques lack important features such as analysis of dependency among program entities and consideration of object-oriented features. Thus they may produce imprecise or incorrect results. In this paper, we present a precise dynamic impact analysis approach for object-oriented programs. This approach considers the characteristics of object-oriented programs and performs dependency analysis which may potentially reduce the impact sets by eliminating elements that do not have dependency on the changed elements. Even though our discussion in this paper is based on Java(TM), this approach can be carried out in a language independent manner for broader applications.


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