Not all classes are created equal

Abstract

When evolving an object oriented system, one relevant question is the following: given a finite amount of resources, what are the most critical classes on which testers should focus their attention? In this paper, we propose a new way for identifying critical classes: classes often changed and playing a key role in the system. We rely on error correcting graph matching (ECGM) and random walks to associate each class with a pair of values representative of the frequency of changes and the class overall connectivity.