A Framework for Advancing Change Impact Analysis in Software Development Using Graph Database
Mahmoud M. El Nemr, Doaa Saad Elzanfaly · 2018
Software systems are subject to continuous change as they always grow in size and complexity. Change Impact Analysis is a critical tool in controlling changes, and its importance in software maintenance and requirements engineering has garnered it much attention in literature. The analysis process should be able to trace a change from the requirement models down to specific source code elements, and vice versa. This however proves very difficult as the sheer size of information in software systems poses a problem for storage and navigation. While many methods exist to perform change impact analysis, few have attempted it on multiple scopes of a software system even though change is not limited to a specific scope. This project aims to propose an impact analysis framework for a combined scope of system development models by means of utilizing traceability links between these models. This is made possible by using graph databases as a data store for the various models and a querying tool. Graph databases are powerful in analyzing relationships among entities, and are proven to be extremely scalable, allowing them to store all details related to software models.