Diver: precise dynamic impact analysis using dependence-based trace pruning

Abstract

Impact analysis determines the effects that the behavior of program entities, or changes to them, can have on the rest of the system. Dynamic impact analysis is one practical form that computes smaller impact sets than static alternatives for concrete sets of executions. However, existing dynamic approaches can still produce impact sets that are too large to be useful. To address this problem, we present a novel dynamic impact analysis called DIVER that exploits static dependencies to identify runtime impacts much more precisely without reducing safety and at acceptable costs. Our preliminary empirical evaluation shows that DIVER can significantly increase the precision of dynamic impact analysis.