Change impact analysis and its regression test effort estimation

Software maintenance is the most demanding and effort-consuming phase in software development. It has been recognized as being a tedious step in software development process. Two basic activities in software maintenance are the understanding of the system and the assessment of the potential effects of a change. A change to a system, however small, can lead to several accidental effects, which are often not obvious and easy to identify. The main purpose of impact analysis is not only to find the impact set in terms of coding elements but also in terms of effort and resources required for implementing the change so that analysts could analyze the impact of the requested change in terms of budget. The objective of this paper is to find the impact set of the change requested by user or client. By using the impact set we estimate the regression test effort. We illustrate our results with a case study. As the results of this work, we get the impact set having impact element as class names with respect to the requested change, the test suite and the effort required for regression testing after the implementation of the requested change.