Multi-perspective change impact analysis using linked data of software engineering

Abstract

Change impact analysis plays an important role in software maintenance and evolution. However existing researches mostly focus on one single artifact. Software development is usually accompanied by various types of software artifacts, such as requirement documents, software architectures, test cases, source code, etc., requiring a much more comprehensive change impact analysis. This paper presents a novel approach to multi-perspective change impact analysis that is able to address heterogeneous software artifacts. The essential idea of the novel approach is (1) to adopt semantic web to construct automatically ontology based software engineering linked data, which links requirements, classes, code, bug reports, commits, developers, test cases and others, (2) to build a weighted change impact matrix/graph using the dependency features extracted from linked data, and (3) to follow a change impact propagation algorithm to analyze the overall change impacts. We have conducted experiments on two open source projects (HtmlUnit and OpenRocket) to evaluate our approach. The experimental results show that our approach achieves better F-measure and stability than existing multi-perspective change impact analysis approaches.