An Efficient Dynamic Impact Analysis using Definition and Usage Information

Software undergoes many changes during maintenance due to shortened development cycles and increased frequency of software updates because of errors, incompatibility or missing functionalities. Impact Analysis is the process of estimating the effect of such changes on the software system after or before modifications. More recently, researchers have begun to investigate dynamic impact-analysis techniques which rely on dynamic information (collected during run time) about software behavior. In this paper, we present a new technique for dynamic impact analysis. The technique is based on a novel algorithm that collects only the essential dynamic information required to be analyzed during regression testing.