Towards a Safe Method for Computing Dependencies in Database-Intensive Systems

Determining dependencies between different components of an application is useful in lots of applications (e.g., architecture reconstruction, reverse engineering, regression test case selection, change impact analysis). However, implementing automated methods to recover dependencies has many challenges, particularly in systems using databases, where dependencies may arise via database access. Furthermore, it is especially hard to find safe techniques (which do not omit any important dependency) that are applicable to large and complex systems at the same time. We propose two techniques that can cope with these problems in most situations. These methods compute dependencies between procedures or database tables, and they are based on the simultaneous static analysis of the source code, the database schema and the SQL instructions. In this paper, we quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the methods on real-life data, and also evaluate them on some of their potential applications.