The Hybrid Technique for Object-Oriented Software Change Impact Analysis

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.