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Improving Manual Change Impact Analysis with Tool Support: A Study in an Industrial Project

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Book cover Software Quality. Software and Systems Quality in Distributed and Mobile Environments (SWQD 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 200))

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Abstract

Change impact analysis is a challenging activity due to the usually huge number of dependencies that have to be considered. Nevertheless it is still often performed manually, relying on expert knowledge and intuition. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the practice of manual change impact analysis and to explore the benefits of tool support in the context of an industrial project. A study has been conducted with experienced developers estimating the changes necessary for implementing bug fixes and feature requests extracted from the project’s history. The results of the manual change impact analysis showed a low estimation performance, which could be improved with tool support to achieve a higher number of hits at the expense of more false positives.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the competence centers program COMET of the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG). Furthermore, the authors would like to thank the developers involved in the analyzed industry project for participating in the study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software Analytics and Evolution, Software Competence Center Hagenberg GmbH, Softwarepark 21, 4232, Hagenberg, Austria

    Thomas Wetzlmaier & Rudolf Ramler

Authors
  1. Thomas Wetzlmaier
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  2. Rudolf Ramler
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rudolf Ramler .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Dietmar Winkler

  2. Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Stefan Biffl

  3. Software Quality Lab GmbH, Linz, Austria

    Johannes Bergsmann

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Wetzlmaier, T., Ramler, R. (2015). Improving Manual Change Impact Analysis with Tool Support: A Study in an Industrial Project. In: Winkler, D., Biffl, S., Bergsmann, J. (eds) Software Quality. Software and Systems Quality in Distributed and Mobile Environments. SWQD 2015. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 200. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13251-8_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13251-8_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-13250-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-13251-8

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