A system and method determine the possibility of adverse effect arising
from a code change in a computer program. The system and method comprise
the steps of identifying important classes within a computer program and
determining directly and indirectly dependent classes of the important
classes. The important classes comprise superclasses of the directly and
indirectly dependent classes. The method associates test cases with the
important classes and with the directly and indirectly dependent classes.
Additionally, for a given code change to first important class, the
method runs all test cases associated with the first important class and
associated with dependent classes of the first important class, and
indicates the possibility of an adverse effect if any run test case
fails.