An Experimental Protocol for Analyzing the Accuracy of Software Error Impact Analysis

by Vincenzo Musco, Martin Monperrus and Philippe Preux

Abstract: In software engineering, error impact analysis consists in predicting the software elements (e.g. modules, classes, methods) potentially impacted by a change. Impact analysis is required to optimize the testing effort. In this paper we present a new protocol to analyze the accuracy of impact analysis. This protocol uses mutation testing to simulate changes that introduce errors. To this end, we introduce a variant of call graphs we name the "use graph" of a software which may be computed efficiently. We apply this protocol to two open-source projects and correctly predict the impact of 30% to 49% of changes.

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Vincenzo Musco, Martin Monperrus and Philippe Preux, "An Experimental Protocol for Analyzing the Accuracy of Software Error Impact Analysis", In Tenth IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Automation of Software Test, Florence, Italy, 2015.

An Experimental Protocol for Analyzing the Accuracy of Software Error Impact Analysis
https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01120913/file/paper.pdf

Bibtex Entry:

@inproceedings{musco:hal-01120913,
 title = {{An Experimental Protocol for Analyzing the Accuracy of Software Error Impact Analysis}},
 author = {Musco, Vincenzo and Monperrus, Martin and Preux, Philippe},
 url = {https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01120913/file/paper.pdf},
 booktitle = {{Tenth IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Automation of Software Test}},
 year = {2015},
 doi = {10.1109/AST.2015.20},
}