Irina Ioana Brudaru
Andreas Zeller
ABSTRACT
During their life cycle, programs undergo many changes. Each of these changes may introduce new features---or new problems. While most of the impact of a change is immediate, some of the impact may become evident only in the long term. For instance, suppose we make the internals of a component accessible to its clients. In itself, this does not introduce a problem. In the long term, though, this will most likely lead to maintainability issues.
We are currently exploring ways to identify this long-term impact of change. We want to show how a change eventually impacts program quality (in terms of defects), program maintainability, and development effort. Identifying those changes with the greatest impact will foster our understanding of a program's history, and help us in learning lessons for future projects. Eventually, such lessons may come as automated recommendations regarding long-term impact: "In the long run, this change will cause maintainability issues. Do you want to reconsider?"
- B. Fluri, M. Wuersch, M. Pinzger, and H. Gall. Change distilling: Tree differencing for fine-grained source code change extraction. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng., 33(11):725--743, 2007. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- A. Hassan and R. Holt. Using development history sticky notes to understand software architecture, 2004.Google Scholar
- X. Ren, F. Shah, F. Tip, B. G. Ryder, and O. Chesley. Chianti: a tool for change impact analysis of java programs. SIGPLAN Not., 39(10):432--448, 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Śliwerski, T. Zimmermann, and A. Zeller. Hatari: raising risk awareness. In ESEC/FSE-13, pages 107--110, New York, NY, USA, 2005. ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- What is the long-term impact of changes?
Recommendations
Capturing the long-term impact of changes
ICSE '10: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 2Developers change source code to add new functionality, fix bugs, or refactor their code. Many of these changes have immediate impact on quality or stability. However, some impact of changes may become evident only in the long term. The goal of this ...
Building journal’s long-term impact: using indicators detected from the sustained active articles
AbstractThe Journal’s Impact Factor is an appropriate measure of recent concern rather than an effective measure of long-term impact of journals. This paper is mainly to find indicators that can effectively quantify the long-term impact of journal, with ...
Comments