Tracking the Ripple Impact of Code Changes through Version Control Systems
Ali Irfan, Arif Ur Rahman · 2019
Continuous updates and modifications are integral part of software development and maintenance process. With the advancements in technology, geographically distributed teams can contribute to code of a project shared with the help of integrated development environments (IDE) like Visual Studio and version control systems (VCS) like VSTS. In addition to managing shared code repository, VCS helps in keeping track of changes made in the source code. However, sometimes developers may detect the ripple impact of changes made in a specific code file. For this purpose, developers have to obtain the specific version of source code file from VCS and then use IDE to track the references of modified methods. This paper proposes an approach that enables VCSs to maintain a log of files and methods that have been affected by changes in a specific method within a project. This will assist developers in reviewing the impact of a specific change prior to merging the code files into their working directory. The proposed technique can be linked with any VCS like GIT, VSTS or Subversion (SVN) in the form of extensions. The effectiveness of having this capability withing the VCS is evaluated through a survey pertaining relevant questions. Survey result yields that having visibility of the source code impacts within the VCS will ease development and review process.