Supporting impact analysis and change propagation in software engineering environments

Impact analysis and change propagation are among the major issues of software change management. In this paper, we introduce an approach to providing impact analysis and change propagation support as an integral part of software engineering environments, so that they can be applied during both software development and maintenance. In this approach, the activities are carried out on the original representation of software artifacts in the environment, rather than on a separate system model extracted. This very fact enables automated direct support for the process of actually carrying out and propagating the changes. Dependences and properties of software artifacts are used for impact analysis to achieve increased flexibility and expressiveness. Both impact analysis and change propagation are a combination of guided user intervention and automatic processing based on codified change patterns and propagation rules.