Chianti: a change impact analysis tool for java programs

ABSTRACT

Chianti is a change impact analysis tool for Java that is implemented in the context of the Eclipse environment. Chianti analyzes two versions of a Java program, decomposes their difference into a set of atomic changes, and a partial order inter-dependences of these changes is calculated. Change impact is then reported in terms of affected (regression or unit) tests whose execution behavior may have been modified by the applied changes. For each affected test, Chianti also determines a set of affecting changes that were responsible for the test's modified behavior. This latter step of isolating failure inducing changes for one specific test from irrelevant changes can be used as a debugging technique in situations where a test fails unexpectedly after a long editing session.

REFERENCES

• 1: Shawn A. Bohner and Robert S. Arnold. An introduction to software change impact analysis. In Shawn A. Bohner and Robert S. Arnold, editors, Software Change Impact Analysis, pages 1--26. IEEE Computer Society Press, 1996.
• 2: James Law , Gregg Rothermel, Whole program Path-Based dynamic impact analysis, Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering, May 03-10, 2003, Portland, Oregon
• 3: Alessandro Orso , Taweesup Apiwattanapong , James Law , Gregg Rothermel , Mary Jean Harrold, An Empirical Comparison of Dynamic Impact Analysis Algorithms, Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering, p.491-500, May 23-28, 2004
• 4: Alessandro Orso , Taweesup Apiwattanapong , Mary Jean Harrold, Leveraging field data for impact analysis and regression testing, Proceedings of the 9th European software engineering conference held jointly with 11th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering, September 01-05, 2003, Helsinki, Finland
• 5: Xiaoxia Ren , Fenil Shah , Frank Tip , Barbara G. Ryder , Ophelia Chesley, Chianti: a tool for change impact analysis of java programs, Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, October 24-28, 2004, Vancouver, BC, Canada
• 6: Xiaoxia Ren, Fenil Shah, Frank Tip, Barbara G. Ryder, Ophelia Chesley, and Julian Dolby. Chianti: A prototype change impact analysis tool for Java. Technical Report DCS-TR-533, Rutgers University Department of Computer Science, September 2003.
• 7: Barbara G. Ryder , Frank Tip, Change impact analysis for object-oriented programs, Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT workshop on Program analysis for software tools and engineering, p.46-53, June 2001, Snowbird, Utah, United States [doi>10.1145/379605.379661]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.6 Programming Environments

  F. Theory of Computation
  F.3 LOGICS AND MEANINGS OF PROGRAMS
      F.3.2 Semantics of Programming Languages

General Terms:
Algorithms, Languages, Measurement, Reliability

Keywords:
analysis of object-oriented programs, change impact analysis, regression test, unit test