Assessing Impact of Class Change by Mining Class Associations

Data mining plays vital role in data analysis and also encompasses immense potential of mining software engineering data to manage design and maintenance issues. Change impact assessment is one of the crucial issues in software maintenance. In Object Oriented (OO) software system, classes are the core components and changes to the classes are always inevitable. So, OO software system must support the expected changes. In this paper, to assess impact of change in the class, we have proposed changeability measures by mining associations among the classes. These measures estimate a) change propagation by identifying its ripple effect; b) change impact set of the classes; c) changeability rank of the classes and d) class change cost. Further, we have performed the empirically study and evaluation to analysis our results. Our results indicate that by mining associations among the classes, the development team can effectively estimate the probable impact of the class change. These measures can be very helpful to perform changes to the classes while maintaining the software system