Variable granularity for improving precision of impact analysis

Impact analysis is a specialized process of program comprehension that investigates the nature and extent of a planned software change. Traditionally, impact analysis involves inspecting dependencies among the software components of a fixed granularity; these components constitute a dependency graph. In this paper, we argue that a single granularity is insufficient and leads to imprecise analysis. We explain how the precision can be improved by variable granularity, where the programmers choose among the granularity of classes, the granularity of class members, and the granularity of code fragments. We assess the resulting precision in a case study on open-source software.