A Learning Algorithm for Change Impact Prediction
Abstract
Change impact analysis consists in predicting the impact of a code change in a software application. In this paper, we take a learning perspective on change impact analysis and consider the problem formulated as follows. The artifacts that are considered are methods of object-oriented software, the change under study is a change in the code of the method, the impact is the test methods that fail because of the change that has been performed. We propose an algorithm, called LCIP that learns from past impacts to predict future impacts. To evaluate our system, we consider 7 Java software applications totaling 214,000+ lines of code. We simulate 17574 changes and their actual impact through code mutations, as done in mutation testing. We find that LCIP can predict the impact with a precision of 69%, a recall of 79%, corresponding to a F-Score of 55%.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1512.07435,
title = {A Learning Algorithm for Change Impact Prediction},
author = {Vincenzo Musco and Antonin Carette and Martin Monperrus and Philippe Preux},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1512.07435},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
5th International Workshop on Realizing Artificial Intelligence Synergies in Software Engineering, 2016