Change impact analysis is defined by Bohner and Arnold as "identifying the potential consequences of a change, or estimating what needs to be modified to accomplish a change", and they focus on IA in terms of scoping changes within the details of a design. In contrast, Pfleeger and Atlee focus on the risks associated with changes and state that IA is: "the evaluation of the many risks associated with the change, including estimates of the effects on resources, effort, and schedule". Both the design details and risks associated with modifications are critical to performing IA within change management processes.

Types of Impact Analysis Techniques

IA techniques can be classified into three types:

• Traceability
• Dependency
• Experiential

Bohner and Arnold identify two classes of IA, traceability and dependency IA. In traceability

Requirements traceability

Requirements traceability is a sub-discipline of requirements management within software development and systems engineering. Requirements traceability is concerned with documenting the life of a requirement and to provide bi-directional traceability between various associated requirements...

 IA, links between requirements, specifications, design elements, and tests are captured, and these relationships can be analysed to determine the scope of an initiating change. In dependency IA, linkages between parts, variables, logic, modules etc. are assessed to determine the consequences of an initiating change. Dependency IA occurs at a more detailed level than traceability IA. Within software design, static

Static code analysis

Static program analysis is the analysis of computer software that is performed without actually executing programs built from that software In most cases the analysis is performed on some version of the source code and in the other cases some form of the object code...

 and dynamic

Dynamic program analysis

Dynamic program analysis is the analysis of computer software that is performed by executing programs built from that software system on a real or virtual processor. For dynamic program analysis to be effective, the target program must be executed with sufficient test inputs to produce interesting...

 algorithms can be run on code to perform dependency IA. Static methods focus on the program structure, while dynamic algorithms gather information about program behaviour at run-time.

Literature and engineering practice also suggest a third type of IA, experiential IA, in that the impact of changes is often determined using expert design knowledge. Review meeting protocols, informal team discussions, and individual engineering judgement can all be used to determine the consequences of a modification.

Software

• Axivion Bauhaus Suite
  Axivion Bauhaus Suite
  The Bauhaus project is a software research project collaboration among the University of Stuttgart, the University of Bremen) and a commercial spin-off company Axivion, formerly called Bauhaus Software Technologies...
  
  
• FindBugs
  FindBugs
  FindBugs is an open source program created by Bill Pugh and David Hovemeyer which looks for bugs in Java code. It uses static analysis to identify hundreds of different potential types of errors in Java programs. FindBugs operates on Java bytecode, rather than source code. The software is...
  
  
• JRipples
  JRipples
  JRipples is a change impact analysis tool for the Java programming language. It helps a developer calculate the impact of software change. It is an open source Eclipse plug-in...
  
  
• Telelogic DOORS
  Telelogic
  Telelogic AB was a software business headquartered in Malmö, Sweden. Telelogic was founded in 1983 as a research and development arm of Televerket, the Swedish department of telecom . It was later acquired by IBM Rational, and exists under the IBM software group.Telelogic had operations in 22...
  
  
• IBM Rational
  Rational Software
  Rational Machines was founded by Paul Levy and Mike Devlin in 1981 to provide tools to expand the use of modern software engineering practices, particularly explicit modular architecture and iterative development...
  
  
• Find it EZ Code Search

Further reading

• Ambler, S. (2002). Agile Modeling: Effective Practices for Extreme Programming and the Unified Process. New York, New York, USA, John Wiley & Sons.
• Bohner, S.A. and R.S. Arnold, Eds. (1996). Software Change Impact Analysis. Los Alamitos, California, USA, IEEE Computer Society Press.
• Eisner, H. (2002). Essentials of Project and Systems Engineering Management. New York, New York, USA, John Wiley & Sons.
• Endres, A. and D. Rombach (2003). A Handbook of Software and Systems Engineering: Empirical Observations, Laws and Theories. New York, New York, USA, Addison-Wesley.
• Kilpinen, M.S. (2008). The Emergence of Change at the Systems Engineering and Software Design Interface: An Investigation of Impact Analysis. PhD Thesis. University of Cambridge. Cambridge, UK.
• Pfleeger, S.L. and J.M. Atlee (2006). Software Engineering: Theory and Practice. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, USA, Prentice Hall.
• Rajlich, V. (2000). "A Model and a Tool for Change Propagation in Software." ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes 25(1):72.
• Ren, X., F. Shah, et al. (2005). Chianti: A Tool for Change Impact Analysis of Java Programs. International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2005), St Louis, Missouri, USA.