Tracking code bug fix ripple effects based on change patterns using Markov chain models

Abstract

Change impact analysis evaluates the changes that are made in the software and finds the ripple effects, in other words, finds the affected software components. Code changes and bug fixes can have a high impact on code quality by introducing new vulnerabilities or increasing their severity. A recent high-visibility example of this is the code changes in the log4j web software CVE-2021-45105 to fix known vulnerabilities by removing and adding method called change types. This bug fix process exposed further code security concerns. In this article, we analyze the most common set of bug fix change patterns to have a better understanding of the distribution of software changes and their impact on code quality. To achieve this, we implemented a tool that compares two versions of the code and extracts the changes that have been made. Then, we investigated how these changes are related to change impact analysis. In our case study, we identified the change types for bug-inducing and bug fix changes using the Quixbugs dataset. Furthermore, we used 13 of the projects and 621 bugs from Defects4J to identify the common change types in bug fixes. Then, to find the change types that cause an impact on the software, we performed an impact analysis on a subset of projects and bugs of Defects4J. The results have shown that, on average, 90% of the bug fix change types are adding a new method declaration and changing the method body. Then, we investigated if these changes cause an impact or a ripple effect in the software by performing a Markov chain-based change impact analysis. The results show that the bug fix changes had only impact rates within a range of 0.4-5%. Furthermore, we performed a statistical correlation analysis to find if any of the bug fixes have a significant correlation with the impact of change. The results have shown that there is a negative correlation between caused impact with the change types adding new method declaration and changing method body. On the other hand, we found that there is a positive correlation between caused impact and changing the field type.