Login
Computer Science @ Rochester
Monday, February 09, 2004
11:00 AM
CSB 209
Barbara Ryder
Rutgers U.
CHIANTI: A Change Impact Analyzer for Object-Oriented Programs
Small changes can have major and non-local effects in object-oriented languages, due to the use of subtyping and dynamic dispatch. This complicates life for maintenance programmers who need to fix bugs or add enhancements to systems originally written by others. Change impact analysis provides feedback on the semantic impact of a program edit expressed as a set of source-level changes. This analysis can be used to determine the regression tests associated with a program that are affected by the edit. Moreover, if a test fails, a subset of changes responsible for the failure can be identified, as well as a subset of changes that can be incorporated safely without affecting any test, thus requiring new tests to be generated. This talk on will cover change impact analysis, concentrating on algorithmic aspects of this research and recent empirical results obtained with the CHIANTI prototype, built in Eclipse, an open source Java integrated development environment.

This is joint research with Dr. Frank Tip of IBM's TJ Watson Research Center and graduate students Xiaoxia Ren and Fenil Shah, supported by NSF grant CCR-0204410 and funds from IBM Research. Our research findings have been published in the ACM SIGPLAN/ SIGSOFT Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering (PASTE'01) and in DCS-TR-533.