An adaptive approach to impact analysis from change requests to source code

Abstract

The paper presents an adaptive approach to perform impact analysis from a given change request (e.g., a bug report) to source code. Given a textual change request, a single snapshot (release) of source code, indexed using Latent Semantic Indexing, is used to estimate the impact set. Additionally, the approach configures the best-fit combination of information retrieval, dynamic analysis, and data mining of past source code commits to produce an improved impact set. The tandem operation of the three techniques sets it apart from other related solutions.