Research Into Change Impact Analysis In Object-Oriented Software Based On Call Graph

Software testing is a crucial means to ensure software quality and improve the reliability of software products.And it is indispensable in a software project.The goal of software testing is to find out errors and bugs with least time and manpower.Regression test is an important part of software testing.It retests the modified program to determine whether changes have been made correctly and to investigate whether those changes will cause any adverse effect on the program behavior.It is vital for the research of regression test to improve the efficiency of regression test and to reduce the test cost.During regression test,"retest-all" is impossible in either cost or time.Especially when a software system has been changed a little,"retest-all" will waste cost.But modified parts may affect the other parts.So software developers need a mechanism which is called change impact analysis to understand how a change impacts the rest of the system.It allows a software developer to know which of the areas in the software system are possibly affected by the change and retest only those classes affected instead of the whole system to reduce test cost.It is important for reducing regression test cost to improve change impact analysis.According to the features of the object-oriented technology,we use class member analysis method to get the relation of class members.We define the call relation of class members, construct a call graph based on class hierarchy analysis,reduce the call graph and put forward algorithms of change types to class members affected by the modified program.Compared with White and Rothermel's algorithm,the algorithm in the paper is much preciser than class diagram, much easier than statement-dependence model.The paper is put forward an algorithm of change impact analysis based on call graph of object-oriented software,designed an analysis architecture for Java program language and implemented a prototype system.