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. It provides an assessment of how much a
local modification in the web application may affect other parts. No previous work has
been published on computing the ripple effect for web application. In this thesis, we
propose, for the first time, 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. Dependences include control
dependences, data dependences, call dependences, semantic dependence, event-based
dependences, functional dependences, and class dependences. Also, a complexity metric
is proposed to be included in computing the ripple effect. A case study is used to show
the applicability of our technique.
