A seismology-inspired approach to study change propagation

  • Authors:

  • Salima Hassaine;Ferdaous Boughanmi;Yann-Gael Gueheneuc;Sylvie Hamel;Giuliano Antoniol

  • Affiliations:

  • DIRO, Université de Montréal, Québec, Canada;DGIGL, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Québec, Canada;DGIGL, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Québec, Canada;DIRO, Université de Montréal, Québec, Canada;DGIGL, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Québec, Canada

  • Venue:
  • ICSM '11 Proceedings of the 2011 27th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Change impact analysis aims at identifying software artefacts that are being affected by a change. It helps developers to assess their change efforts and perform more adequate changes. Several approaches have been proposed to aid in impact analysis. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of these approaches have been used to study the scope of changes in a program. We present a metaphor inspired by seismology and propose a mapping between the concepts of seismology and change propagation, to study the scope of change propagation. We perform three case studies on Pooka, Rhino, and Xerces-J to observe change propagation. We use ANOVA and Duncan statistical tests to assess the statistically significance of our observations, which show that changes propagate to a limited scope.