Change impact analysis for the software development phase: State-of-the-art
Nazri Kama · International Journal of Software Engineering and Its Applications · 2013
Impact analysis predicts the parts of the software system that can be affected by changes in the system. Selecting the approach to perform impact analysis in the software development phase requires consideration of the class artifact status. Static analysis approaches do not require class artifacts to be fully developed. However, the analysis tends to overestimate the number of affected classes. So it is of little practical use. On the other hand, dynamic analysis approaches expect all the class artifacts to be fully developed. So the analysis tends to be imprecise when not all class artifacts are fully developed. This paper reviews current impact analysis techniques’ capability from the perspective of supporting the software development phase implementation. Based on this review, the needs of a new impact analysis technique for the software development phase are then constructed.