Paper Info
Title
Hybrid DOM-Sensitive Change Impact Analysis for JavaScript.
Abstract
JavaScript has grown to be among the most popular programming languages. However, performing change impact analysis on JavaScript applications is challenging due to features such as the seamless interplay with the DOM, event-driven and dynamic function calls, and asynchronous client/server communication. We first perform an empirical study of change propagation, the results of which show that the DOM-related and dynamic features of JavaScript need to be taken into consideration in the analysis since they affect change impact propagation. We propose a DOM-sensitive hybrid change impact analysis technique for Javascript through a combination of static and dynamic analysis. The proposed approach incorporates a novel ranking algorithm for indicating the importance of each entity in the impact set. Our approach is implemented in a tool called Tochal. The results of our evaluation reveal that Tochal provides a more complete analysis compared to static or dynamic methods. Moreover, through an industrial controlled experiment, we find that Tochal helps developers by improving their task completion duration by 78% and accuracy by 223%.
Year
Venue
Field
2015
ECOOP
Change impact analysis,Asynchronous communication,Programming language,Ranking,Computer science,Theoretical computer science,Change propagation,Controlled experiment,Task completion,Empirical research,JavaScript
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
10
0.45
References 
Authors
14
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Saba Alimadadi1524.29
Ali Mesbah 00012824.72
Karthik Pattabiraman3103055.17