The relation between bug fix change patterns and change impact analysis

Abstract

Change impact analysis analyzes the changes that are made in the software and finds the ripple effects, in other words, finds the affected software components. In this study, we analyze the bug fix change patterns to have a better understanding of what types of changes are common in fixing bugs. To achieve this, we implemented a tool that compares two versions of codes and detects the changes that are made. Then, we investigated how these changes are related to change impact analysis. In our case study, we used 13 of the projects and 621 bugs from Defects4J to identify the common change types in bug fixed. Then, to find the change types related to cause an impact in 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 on 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.