See the effects of a change in a shared assembly on an upstream application

Question

I've got a group of WCF services that share several assemblies. When one of these assemblies are changed, I'd like to know what the impact is for any of the services that reference them.

For example, if I have a class named Foo in my shared assembly and it has a method named DoSomething(), which is called by one or more of the dependent services. For release 1, I assume everything is changed, since there's no baseline. For release 2, I've changed the DoSomething() method, and I want to know which services/methods are affected by the change.

My gut feeling is that NDepend should be able to provide this information, but I'm not familiar enough with it to write the query. I'm welcome to solutions that involve other tools as well.

Basically, what I'm looking for is a list of the classes/methods that have changed between two different builds, and the classes/methods that are dependent on them, in order to better target testing efforts, and (less important) deployment.

Answer 1

Some default CQLinq default queries are provided for that.

• Methods directly calling one or several methods changed
• Methods indirectly calling one or several methods changed

Hopefully you can tweak them easily.

To just get the list of changes, have a look at the bunch of diff queries in the group Code Diff Summary.