Research Of The Application Of Change Impact Analysis In C Programs' Defects Prevention

Change impact analysis is a promising technique for software evolution to identify the impact of software change. It could be used to effectively detect syntax change and semantic change according to different granularity. The information provided by change impact analysis would be very important for developers to make correct decisions. It not only estimates the development effort between different revisions and shows the defects distribution, but also determines the impact of different kinds of code changes. As software systems become increasingly large and complex, the need increases to predict and control the effects of software changes.Currently, extensive research work of change impact analysis is being widely deployed. Typical studies include the static analysis based, dynamic analysis based and historical analysis based change impact analysis. And popular applications include the application of change impact analysis in regression test and the application of change impact analysis in preventing the defects of the system. This paper mainly focuses on the latter one. Currently the research of preventing the defects mainly focuses on the object-oriented programs. There is no much empirical study of change impact analysis on C programs.In this paper, change impact analysis is adapted to C Programs. A suite of metrics are defined to estimate the development effort between different versions. Based on these metrics, a Change Impact Analysis System is implemented to collect change data. With this system, the change impact analysis technique is performed on a commercial software and GCC source code. And at last a change impact analysis report to determine the risk degree of different kind of change is concluded. The result shows that change impact analysis technique works well in C Programs'defects prevention...