Impact Analysis of Database Schema Changes on Hibernate Source Code and Test Cases

Abstract

Database design is an important part of software development because it manages the data consistency and makes sure that the data is not in an invalid state. In each software development cycle, the percentages of complexity and size of the database are likely to increase dramatically. Changes in a database schema impact related source code and test cases, which often lead to software process failure. Some studies [1-4] analyzed the impact of these changes using several techniques such as configuration management, traceability relationships, and program slicing to identify factors that caused changes. However, these studies do not emphasize the impact on source code and test cases [5]. Therefore, our research proposes an approach to analyze impacts on Hibernate source code and test cases caused by changing the database schema. In addition, our approach can notify users about changes that occur in the database schema, and line numbers of the affected source code and test cases. Lastly, we also update source code and test cases based on the schema changes.