A visualization technique to support change impacts analysis in program understanding

Abstract

The software need to undergo some changes is to make the software product more reliable and trustworthy. Thus, the developer is responsible to do the changes to make trustworthy software. The changes of the code might be affected to other part of code. These situations make the developer spend more time to find the affected line in entire code. Change Impact Analysis (CIA) method will be apply to support the developer’s program understanding to seek the potential affect or dependency information such as inheritance, Friend, Composition, Calls and Aggregation. A visualization method is applied to make the method effective for program understanding. The visualization method are be use as the tools to represent CIA into graphical that able to guide the developer seeking the potential affect in the line of code. The prototype was developed to combine CIA and visualization method based on C++ Object-Oriented language to enhance program understanding. The prototype called CIA-V will guide the developer to understand the program through diagram and save the time to find affected code.