Change Impact Analysis by Architecture-based Assessment and Planning

Abstract

Software architecture presents the main artifact of software systems reflecting design decisions and thus influence their quality attributes. Furthermore, during software evolution each architecture decision also influences technical artifacts (e.g., test cases) and the corresponding orga- nizational responsibilities (e.g., tester). Thus, it is important to predict the impact of a change request (e.g., changing an interface) on the software architecture and other software artifacts for decision- making. Hence, a software architect can estimate the effort of the implementation of a change request due to corresponding implementation tasks. However, existing approaches are limited to artifacts of the software development process or do not use formal architecture descriptions. We present the Karlsruhe Architectural Maintainability Prediction (KAMP), that enables software architects to ana- lyze the propagation of change requests in software architecture models. Our approach is not limited to the technical operations but as well considers the organizational tasks. KAMP supports softwa- re architects by automatically generated task lists to implement changes. In an empirical study, we showed, that KAMP improves the scalability, precision, and completeness of change propagation analysis.