Controlling side-effects in maintenance
Gerardo Canfora, Giuseppe Antonio Di Lucca, Maria Tortorella · 1996
Each time a maintenance operation is performed on a program the overall quality of a software system can rapidly decrease because of the introduction of side effects. Such side effects are due to the relationships existing between the components of a software system, and these can be classified into potential relationships and actual relationships. Successful maintenance requires knowledge of both actual and potential relationships in order to avoid, or at least reduce to a minimum, the introduction of side-effects.A method is proposed to analyze both potential and actual relationships existing in programs coded by a language with strict scope and visibility rules. The method is based on the definition, use and computation of some Boolean matrices and allows the identification of the software units that will be affected by a modification involving data references in a software unit.