Reconstructing Development Artifacts for Change Impact Analysis

Abstract

Software architectural models are widely used to represent the structure of software systems. Software systems need to evolve continuously during their life time, for instance, to adapt to new requirements. Dur- ing the evolution various change requests have to be implemented. However, analysing the architecture of a system alone does not provide sufficient information for an adequate estimation of the impact resulting by such change requests. In addition, many other development artifacts, such as test cases, have to be considered. Creating models of these artifacts by hand is time-consuming and error-prone. In this paper, we present an approach that automatically extracts de- velopment artifacts and annotates them to a software architectural model.