Ripple effect in web applications

Abstract

The number of internet web applications is rapidly increasing in a variety of fields and not much work has been done for ensuring their quality, especially after modification. Modifying any part of a web application may affect other parts. If the stability of a web application is poor, then the impact of modification will be costly in terms of maintenance and testing. Ripple effect is a measure of the structural stability of source code upon changing a part of the code, which provides an assessment of how much a local modification in the web application may affect other parts. Limited work has been published on computing the ripple effect for web application. In this paper, the authors propose, a technique for computing ripple effect in web applications. This technique is based on direct-change impact analysis and dependence analysis for web applications developed in the .Net environment. Also, a complexity metric is proposed to be included in computing the ripple effect in web applications.