An Experimental Protocol for Analyzing the Accuracy of Software Error Impact Analysis

International audienceIn software engineering, error impact analysis consists in predicting the software elements (e.g. modules, classes, methods) potentially impacted by a change. Impact analysis is required to optimize the testing effort. In this paper we present a new protocol to analyze the accuracy of impact analysis. This protocol uses mutation testing to simulate changes that introduce errors. To this end, we introduce a variant of call graphs we name the "use graph" of a software which may be computed efficiently. We apply this protocol to two open-source projects and correctly predict the impact of 30% to 49% of changes