A Dynamic Impact Analysis Approach for Object-Oriented Programs

Abstract

Dynamic impact analysis produces more precise results than static impact analysis [1]. However, existing dynamic impact analysis techniques [2,3,4] do not consider the differences of object-oriented (OO) programs from procedural programs. We introduced a dynamic impact analysis approach [5] for OO programs that considers the unique features of OO programs compared to procedural ones and the dependency relationships of OO runtime program entities. In this paper, we present the further improved approach with the ability to identify runtime OO inheritance relationships. Furthermore, we present the implementation of our approach - a tool named Javatrade dynamic impact analyzer (JDIA) that can perform dynamic impact analysis for Java programs residing in a local or a remote Java virtual machine (JVM). Empirical studies of JDIA are presented to show that our approach produces more precise results than the existing dynamic impact analysis techniques by performing dependency analysis.