While determining the impact of various bug fixes, I often find myself trying to find all the routes through the codebase which can end up in my changed code. This is a tedious manual process, involving lots of clicking on method names in Eclipse and searching for ‘References…’ while I draw a tree structure of calls in my notepad.
This seems like it should be automatable, but whenever I search for such tools I fail to find such a thing. There seem to be tools which will analyse code for bugs, race-conditions, etc (FindBugs, PMD, Checkstyle, for example) but nothing which will simply output potential routes through the code. It’s quite possible I’m not using the correct search terms.
Does such a tool exist for Java or I have overlooked a key reason why this is not possible?
I believe you are looking for a call hierarchy. It is built in Eclipse, IntelliJ and Netbeans.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=eclipse+call+hierarchy