Change impact analysis from business rules

Abstract

Impact analysis is the identification of the potential consequences of a change, or estimating what needs to be modified to accomplish a change, including related costs and schedule estimates. In this work, we distinguish between two kinds of concerns related to impact analysis: (1) business-specific concerns, those related to stakeholders interested in checking if other business rules are impacted by the change and also need to be modified; and (2) software-specific concerns, those related to stakeholders interested in the impacted software artifacts that need to be modified. Several traceability techniques have been studied and none of them supported impact analysis that dealt with business-specific concerns with reasonable values of precision and recall for the discovered impacts. Our research work aims to support business-specific concerns during impact analysis, by proposing and evaluating a traceability technique that resorts on a new traceability model defined over business rules, with expected precision and recall values of 100%.