Extending software change impact analysis into COTS components

As software components and middleware occupy more and more of the software engineering landscape, interoperability relationships point to increasingly relevant software change impacts. Packaged software now represents over thirty-two percent of the software in most organizations. While traceability and dependency analysis frameworks have effectively supported software impact analysis in the past, they do not adequately addressed this trend. As software systems grow in size and complexity, their dependency webs of information also extend beyond most software engineers ability to comprehend them. We examine research for extending current software change impact analysis to incorporate interoperability dependency relationships for addressing distributed applications and explores three dimensional (3D) visualization techniques for more effective navigation of software changes.