The importance of decision strategy and role in a software change impact analysis performance (original) (raw)

Assessing Issues of Change Impact Analysis Process for a Software Projects

Software Change Impact Analysis (SCIA) has defined as a process of identifying the consequences of the software changes requests. Almost no major corporations are free from the challenge of developing and implementing successful strategies for managing change. Different studies have been conducted in this subject for the last two decades, several approaches have been proposed. But most of these studies have less support to the current process of a software change management. The complexities of software change development nowadays cause the process of managing software change to be difficulty. There is major organizations that are free from the challenges of initiating, developing and implementing effective software changes management. As a result, software practitioners recognize that strategic change is not temporary issues but it’s continued process. Only few project managers got the ability to manage the change efficiently. Therefore, this paper investigates issues of change impact analysis process and identifies and compares current practice issues of a software change impact analysis, by evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. It also reviews existing tools and models of change impact analysis and how it supports to the current software change managements. Hence, it proposes existing process issues and suggests the need of an effective process of software change management.

Identifying challenges of change impact analysis for software projects

2012

Project changes are difficult since the impacts of the changes are not readily known in advance. Changing customer needs and technology are driving factors influencing project evolution. Consequently, there is a need to assess the impact of these changes on existing software systems. For safety-critical system, the changes can even introduce hazards to bug down the system, particularly for larger systems, it quickly become difficult to comprehend what impact of requirement change might have on the overall system or parts of the system. Impact analysis is identifying the potential impact of disruption caused by a change to one or more components in the requirement on other components. The significant behind impact analysis is to identify requirement elements that may be affected by the change. However, this paper deals with impact analysis approach during project changes and identifies issues of impact analysis and where change impact analysis applied during software development projects

A Change Impact Analysis Tool for Software Development Phase

Accepting too many software change requests could contribute to expense and delay in project delivery. On the other hand rejecting the changes may increase customer dissatisfaction. Software project management might use a reliable estimation on potential impacted artifacts to decide whether to accept or reject the changes. In software development phase, an assumption that all classes in the class artifact are completely developed is impractical compared to software maintenance phase. This is due to some classes in the class artifact are still under development or partially developed. This paper extends our previous works on developing an impact analysis approach for the software development phase in automating the approach which we call it CIAT (Change Impact Analysis Tool). The significant achievements of the tool are demonstrated through an extensive experimental validation using several case studies. The experimental analysis shows improvement in the accuracy over current impact analysis results.

A Conceptual Model of Impact Analysis for Requirements Change

Requirements change in software is inevitable due to the dynamic needs of business process and environment. This change needs to be managed accordingly by determining the influencing elements as well as assessing their impacts to the current environment through impact analysis. This critical task is accomplished by a dedicated team, namely Change Control Board (CCB). In essence, an impact analysis helps CCB to visualize the potential impacts of change towards organization before implementing them. This is vital because an improper analysis may not only affect project but also organization sustainability. Previous studies have identified some contributing elements for requirements change. However, they are isolated and disintegrated between technical and non-technical perspectives that cause impact analyses to be difficult. This paper therefore collated the necessary elements for requirements change impact analysis that encompasses both perspectives. The elements were identified through reviews and were analysed by using content analysis. The elements form a conceptual model for requirements change impact analysis. The model illustrates the relationships between elements, which is important to assess the impacts of requirements change. The model can be used by CCB as a guide to decide the way forward a particular requirements change request.

A Risk Model of Requirements Change Impact Analysis

Journal of Software, 2014

Software systems are critical assets to organisations as they support important business processes and workflow. To maintain the value of these assets, the requirements of software systems must evolve whenever there are changes in business needs. A key problem to organisations is implementing requirements change to the existing software systems. Such initiatives need proper analyses so that their effects could be determined before resources are spent. Impact analysis is therefore an important step in requirements change management. As a project, any change implementation involves risks. It is thus necessary for impact analysis to consider risk factors for implementing requirements change. However to date, the risk factors concerning requirement change are not much explored. This paper aims to identify the risk factors for implementing requirements change. The risk factors were identified through two qualitative approaches, namely a review of related work and a focus group study. The former involved fifty published articles and the latter concerned five domain experts. The collected risk factors from both studies were analysed by using content analysis. The risk factors form a risk model for analysing impacts of implementing requirements change. The model helps practitioners to assess the viability of requirements change requests.

Experienced Report on Assessing and Evaluating Change Impact Analysis through a Framework and Associated Models

Journal of Information Science and …, 2009

In our evolving computing environment with heterogenously distributed information systems, products are continuously modified and changed. During this process a change to one part will, in most cases, results in changes to other parts. Therefore, in design and redesign for customization, predicting this change presents a significant challenge. Changes are required to fix faults or to improve or update products. This paper reports on the development of a change impact analysis factor adaptation model, a fault and failure assumption model and the implementation of a generic change propagation framework for evaluating and assessing utility service provisioning in a Grid service environment. While implementing the framework, data was collected for a period of 3 years which helped in predicting an immediate year. The obtained results from our pre-diction shows the framework, its associated models and Bayesian statistics as satisfying the criteria for a significant prediction accuracy in evaluating and assessing the effect of a change of service in a grid environment when compared to an unreported regression method.

Change Impact Analysis in Agile Development

2014

Any change that will influence the system’s safety requirements after we have finished the safety analysis and safety planning for development of safety-critical software will require a change impact analysis. One of the reasons for using Scrum is its declarations to “embrace change”. Using agile development we may add new requirements, change existing requirements and make current requirements more detailed both in the product backlog and in the sprint backlogs. Problems, methods and necessary reports related to the consequences of such changes have been discussed and analysed in the SUSS (Agile Development of Safety Critical Software) project. We have come up with an extended Scrum model which includes the change impact analysis for all potential changes to the Scrum backlog. In addition, we have designed a change impact analysis process plus a template for a change impact analysis report. Before we entered the software development part of the project, which is Scrum’s domain, we ...

Preface to "Software Change Impact Analysis

Ieee Computer Society, 1996

What is Software Change Impact Analysis? Software change impact analysis, or impact analysis for short, estimates what will be affected in software and related documentation if a proposed software change is made. Impact-analysis information can be used for planning changes, making changes, accommodating certain types of software changes, and tracing through the effects of changes. Impact analysis provides visibility into the potential effects of changes before the changes are implemented. This can make it easier to perform changes more accurately. Why This Book? This book is a collection of tutorial papers, trade articles, and software-research literature that capture current impact-analysis techniques and technical results. Much has been written on impact analysis, but it is scattered across magazines and books and is time-consuming to collect, review, and evaluate. This book grew from our perception that, with the great interest in software change, people need a handy, one-volume source of useful information. We have collected scattered technical information on the science and art of determining what software parts affect one another. We have sifted through many papers, articles, and technical reports. We have distilled the themes, trends, and techniques of impact analysis so that our book can frame the field, focus attention, and temper expectations.

A Model-Driven Development (MDD) Approach to Change Impact Analysis

2010

This paper presents a change impact analysis approach created as part of a model-driven development (MDD) environment. Its purpose is to give project stakeholders the ability to better assess the impact that requirement changes will impose on project schedule and budget. Using MDD techniques and visualization tools we were able to automate requirement change impact analysis. Therefore, the following discussion focuses on how this environment can help software project managers, developers, and other stakeholders increase their productivity and evaluate how client changes affect their daily work.