A SOFTWARE TRACEABILITY MODEL TO SUPPORT CHANGE IMPACT ANALYSIS
Suhaimi Ibrahim, Norbik Bashah Idris, Malcolm Munro, Aziz Deraman · 2005
It is inevitable that a software undergoes some change in its lifetime. With some change requests comes a need to estimate the scope (e.g. size and complexity) of the proposed changes and plan for their implementation. Software traceability and its subsequent impact analysis help relate the consequences or ripple-effects of a proposed change across different levels of software models. In this paper, we present a software traceability approach to support change impact analysis of object oriented software. The significant contribution in our traceability approach can be observed in its ability to integrate the high level with the low level software models that include the requirements, test cases, design and code. Our approach allows a software traceability between software components not only within a workproduct but also across different workproducts in SDLC. It supports the top down and bottom up traceability in response to tracing for the potential effects. We developed a software prototype called CATIA to support C++ software and applied it to a case study of an embedded system, and finally we discuss the results.