A software change impact analysis taxonomy

Source code changes can have ripple-effects that result in unchanged source code elements producing different results than they would have produced before the changes. This paper proposes a taxonomy of the types of impacts that can result from source code changes in both procedural and object-oriented code. The taxonomy is extensible by creating additional sub-types of the types proposed. The proposed taxonomy is based on an analysis of existing change impact analysis algorithms and provides a basis for classifying change impact analysis algorithms by the types of impacts they identify.