Software Change Impact Analysis (Practitioners)

The book provides a battery of ideas for doing impact analysis better. The reader will gain a healthy respect for the strengths and limitations of impact analysis technology and a solid background that will provide valuable for years to come. The book identifies key impact analysis definitions and themes and illustrates those themes through a collection of representative papers. It includes reports on software source code dependency analysis and software traceability analysis and proposes how results from both areas can more effectively support impact analysis in software engineering repositories. It also describes why impact representation and determination techniques are at the heart of both source dependency analysis and traceability analysis. The papers provide fundamental information of enduring value and were selected by how well they illustrate the important themes and how well they equip the reader with a solid understanding for tackling impact analysis problems.

Chapter 1 is titled Nature of Impact Analysis and contains A Process Model for Software Maintenance, Impact Analysis-Towards A Framework for Comparison, and The Year 2000 Problem: Impact, Strategies, and Tools. Although the last paper is obviously out of date, some of the techniques are worth examining, especially since a good amount of the Y2K problem required impact and risk analysis.

State of the Practice is the topic of chapter 2, and contains the following papers: An Analysis of the Requirements Traceability Problem, Software Change Impact Analysis for Design Evolution and Configuration Management Survey. These three papers are a combination of practice and theory.

The material in Chapter 3, Automated Support for Impact Analysis, is spotty. Some is out of date in my opinion, while other papers are as fresh today as when the book was published. Papers in this chapter are: The Integrated CASE Manifesto, A Practical Software Maintenance Environment, Intelligent Assistance for Software Development and Maintenance and Maintenance Support for Object-Oriented Programs (the last is excellent!). Chapter 4 contains the most practical material in the collection. The topic title is Dependency-Analysis Approaches, and the papers are: Using Dependence Analysis to Support the Software Maintenance Process, Interprocedural Slicing Using Dependence Graphs, Data Dependency Graphs for Ada Programs, Data Flow Analysis and its Application to Software Maintenance and Change Impact Identification in Object Oriented Software Maintenance.

Papers in Chapter 5 (Traceability Approaches) are also mostly practical, but many are out of date or contain information that was a good idea at the time, but seem quaint by today's standards. Paper topics are: A Hypertext System to Manage Software Life-Cycle Documents (very much ahead of its time, but woefully out of date now), A Software Documentation Support Environment-Its Definition, Traceability Based on Design Decisions (this is *must reading* in my opinion) and A Process for Consolidating and Reusing Design Knowledge. Chapter 6's papers address Impact Representation. While many were written a decade ago all of them are interesting and include ideas that are as valid today. Topics are: The Prism Model of Changes, A Unified Interprocedural Program Representation for a Maintenance Environment, A Formal Model of Program Dependencies and Its Implications for Software Testing, Debugging, and Maintenance and A Graph Model for Software Evolution.

Chapter 7 is devoted to Impact-Determination Techniques and contains interesting papers that are more theoretical than practical in my opinion. Topics are: An Early Impact Analysis Technique for Software Maintenance, Using Program Slicing in Software Maintenance, Efficient Algorithms for the Instantiated Transitive Closure Queries, and Approximate Reasoning About the Semantic Effects of Program Changes. Chapter 8 is a synopsis of material in the preceding chapters, with and commentary and observations about impact analysis as a discipline.

Overall, this book represents a substantial cross section of the body of knowledge devoted to software change impact analysis. Some strengths include the fact that this collection of papers makes the body of knowledge available in one book, and the focus of the papers on software engineering aspects of change and maintenance, and how to manage impact to complex applications. A key weakness is that some of the papers are over 10 years old. However, despite the age of some of the papers many are surprisingly applicable to maintenance challenges faced by practitioners today.