CodeTrack: uma ferramenta para análise contínua de conflitos indiretos de software

Abstract

The necessity of software evolution for those which solve daily problems became even more frequent and the software engineering had to be adapted in order to be able to delivery products with good quality in tight dead lines. In order to the software continues being useful during its life cycle, to the main purpose whose was developed, its necessary to apply changes or include new features due to changes which happens in the business. Rewrite the same block of code is not a recommended approach on software development, because it spreads code in a distributed and disordered way. Applying the code reuse, the same block of code already wrote is referenced by different use cases through the dependency chain and method calls, where different parts of the code, which are being relate to differents funcionalitys, going to depend to the same component. Changes applyed to a block of code which has direct or indirect relation with differents use cases may lead to umpredictable fails, depending on the number of different artifacts related and the extension of dependency chain related to the artifact which was modified, this change may cause a impact on another use case which, by a first look, does not have any relation which the modified block of code. Predict impacts from in a specific artifact is a task which demands time to analysis, deep knowledge of the source-code and test effort. This paper presents an approach to automatize the identification of possible indirect conflicts using the developed tool, whose can determinate which use cases are more defect prone by source-code changes, providing a more effective direction to the test’s efforts. A Study Case was elaborated, assessing a real project of extensive dimension whose doesn’t have a automatized test case suite, and the developed tool was able to identify the indirect conflicts on differents cenarios and besides, the tool was able to proof in a empiric experiment which the major failures, caused by indirect conflicts could be avoided if the tool were be used during the development fase.