Predicting change propagation in software systems

Software systems contain entities, such as functions and variables, which are related to each other. As a software system evolves to accommodate new features and repair bugs, changes occur to these entities. Developers must ensure that related entities are updated to be consistent with these changes. This paper addresses the question: How does a change in one source code entity propagate to other entities? We propose several heuristics to predict change propagation. We present a framework to measure the performance of our proposed heuristics. We validate our results empirically using data obtained by analyzing the development history for five large open source software systems.