Program view generation and change analysis using attributed dependency graphs

Abstract

AbstractSoftware maintenance is usually the most expensive phase of the software life‐cycle. Program understanding and impact‐of‐change analysis are two of the major activities during this phase. In this paper, we describe attributed program dependency graphs (APDGs), a model to store information derived from the program source code and ease construction of tools for software maintenance. We show how the model can be used for interactive view generation and doing two kinds of impact‐of‐change analysis—incremental and comparison‐oriented. Incremental change analysis uses APDGs and a Rule Base to provide a way for the user to analysis the effect of proposed well‐defined changes. Comparison‐oriented change analysis allows a user to generate structural semantic differences between two versions of a subsystem after an arbitrary sequence of changes. We also introduce SCAN, a prototype collection of loosely integrated tools based on the APDG model and describe our experiences with the system.