Software Change Impact Analysis

As software systems become increasingly large and complex, the need increases to predict and control the effects of software changes. This book captures the latest information on the science and art of determining what software parts affect each other. It is a handy one-volume source of useful information about software change impact analysis techniques and technical results. The book frames the field, focuses attention, and tempers expectations.

The book provides a battery of ideas for doing impact analysis better. The reader will gain a healthy respect for the strengths and limitations of impact analysis technology and a solid background that will provide valuable for years to come. The book identifies key impact analysis definitions and themes and illustrates those themes through a collection of representative papers. It includes reports on software source code dependency analysis and software traceability analysis and proposes how results from both areas can more effectively support impact analysis in software engineering repositories. It also describes why impact representation and determination techniques are at the heart of both source dependency analysis and traceability analysis. The papers provide fundamental information of enduring value and were selected by how well they illustrate the important themes and how well they equip the reader with a solid understanding for tackling impact analysis problems.

Preface.

Acknowledgments.

An Introduction to Software Change Impact Analysis.

Chapter 1. Nature of Impact Analysis.

A Process Model for Software Maintenance.

Impact Analysis-Towards A Framework for Comparison.

The Year 2000 Problem: Impact, Strategies, and Tools.

Chapter 2. State of the Practice.

An Analysis of the Requirements Traceability Problem.

Software Change Impact Analysis for Design Evolution.

Configuration Management Survey.

Chapter 3. Automated Support for Impact Analysis.

The Integrated CASE Manifesto.

Practical Software Maintenance Environment.

Intelligent Assistance for Software Development and Maintenance.

Maintenance Support for Object-Oriented Programs.

Chapter 4. Dependency-Analysis Approaches.

Using Dependence Analysis to Support the Software Maintenance Process.

Interprocedural Slicing Using Dependence Graphs.

Data Dependency Graphs for Ada Programs.

Data Flow Analysis and its Application to Software Maintenance.

Change Impact Identification in Object Oriented Software Maintenance.

Chapter 5. Traceability Approaches.

A Hypertext System to Manage Software Life-Cycle Documents.

SODOS: A Software Documentation Support Environment-Its Definition.

Traceability Based on Design Decisions.

A Process for Consolidating and Reusing Design Knowledge.

Chapter 6. Impact Representation.

The Prism Model of Changes.

A Unified Interprocedural Program Representation for a Maintenance Environment.

A Formal Model of Program Dependences and Its Implications for Software Testing, Debugging, and Maintenance.

A Graph Model for Software Evolution.

Chapter 7. Impact-Determination Techniques.

An Early Impact Analysis Technique for Software Maintenance.

Using Program Slicing in Software Maintenance.

Efficient Algorithms for the Instantiated Transitive Closure Queries.

Approximate Reasoning About the Semantic Effects of Program Changes.

Chapter 8. Final Remarks.

Annotated Bibliography.

Authors Biographies.