Understanding Semantic Impact of Source Code Changes: An Empirical Study

Since source code is the ultimate definition of the behavior of a software product, changes to source code become the critical factor in understanding behavioral changes and predicting faults. In studies on source code changes, text or syntactic approaches have been widely used. Textual analysis focuses on changed text fragments while syntactic analysis focuses on changed syntactic entities. Although both of them have demonstrated their advantages in experimental results, they have only focused on changed code. Because of semantic dependencies within programs, the authors believe that code impacted by changes is also helpful. Given a source code change, they identify its impact by program slicing along the variable def-use chains.