Automation of Change Impact Analysis for Python Applications

Abstract

AbstractSoftware applications have to be updated on an ongoing basis as per the requirements of the user or the client or to fix any bugs. The cost of this maintenance phase of a software application typically costs more than 50% of all other software development life cycle (SDLC) phases. When a change request (CR) is received from the client, developers have to work upon the request. It may be possible that as a result of addressing this CR, it may impact other areas of the existing application functionality. This mandates that developer working on this CR should have complete knowledge of the application codebase and working scenarios. Quite often, developer may be lacking this extensive expertise and also may not have the time required to spend in doing the detailed impact analysis. There are some change impact analysis (CIA) tools which can aid developer in finding out almost all impacted elements for a given CR. But no such tool or prototype exists for Python applications which can aid developer in finding out impacted elements for a CR. This paper aims at developing an impact analysis tool (HETeye) which will help the developer to know what all elements of the Python source code will be affected and the dependencies of affected elements upon giving a CR and blacklist words which help in filtering the results even further.KeywordsChange requestChange impact analysisPythonSDLCSoftware maintenanceCodebaseBlacklist