Research On A Model Of OO Software Change Impact Analysis

It is always a challenge in the software industries that how to handle change exactly in the software development process. On the contrary, with the rapid development of IT, and the continuously accelerating software evolution, the challenge is growing. The Object-Oriented technology, which improved the effort of constructing the large-scale and complicated system, did not meet the challenge essentially. At the same time, the additional complexity, introduced by applying 00, heightened the challenge of Change Impact Analysis for 00 software(CIA for 00).In recent years, although a series of achievements had been delivered in the field of CIA for 00, most of them are drawn in the view of theory and methodology. There is still a shortage of such a model, which could be applied to business not only, but could analyze the impact exactly as well. And this research is a further study along the mentioned-above direction.Based on the detailed analysis of 00 change, an orthogonal disassembly approach in the code view is presented, which splits the original software change into several independent meta-changes, and the impact of original change is the linear sum of the impacts of its meta-changes.Moreover, aimed on the analysis of features of 00 dependencies, especially the dependency's universal transitivity which be considered as a default law in the current academies, a more qualitative analysis is made, and the conditions of dependency's transitivity are defined, which ultimately describes the law of change propagation in software. And then, an improved model of CIA for 00 is developed, in which a directed, multi-edges pseudo-graph model is used to describe the dependencies among the software source code units. In the structure, it introduces a recursive vertex definition, which means a vertex could be a graph, to indicate the relationships among the 00 code units in different granularities. By traversing the source code of 00 software, all the relationships are retrieved and stored into the model. The model takes the meta-changes as input, and calculates the set of impacted units, according to the rules of pre-defined dependency's sensitive change and it's transitivity. On the other side, a set of change effort metrics, used to quantify the exact effort introduced by change, and a set of Change-Oriented design metrics, used to evaluate the design, are presented eventually.An automated tool of CIA for 00 is finally designed in concept, and a prototype system is implemented accordingly. By applying it to a real-world project, the model is demonstrated.