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Supporting impact analysis: a semi-automated technique and associated tool

The paper presents a technique, and associated tool, for supporting the analysis of the impacts of changes on software systems. The approach is to exploit the dependencies that exist within the software system to be modified, modelled as a graph of objects and links. Changes are modelled as events that are propagated upon the graph according to predefined propagation rules. To cover situations in which a deeper analysis is required, it is possible to define potential propagation rules; the impacts of such rules are then declared as potential and a human decision is required to check whether they are real or not. The associated tool encompasses a propagation engine, which implements the automatic propagation of impacts, and a set of user oriented features supporting the control of the propagation engine and providing an highly interactive user interface for analysing the results of the automatic propagation.