Integrating Software Traceability for Change Impact Analysis

Software maintenance is recognized as the most costly activity in software engineering with typical estimates of more than half of the software development cost. The main problem to a maintainer is that seemingly small changes can ripple throughout the system to cause substantial impact elsewhere. 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 involve the requirements, test cases, design and code. Our approach allows a direct link between a component at one level to other components at any levels. It supports the top down and bottom up traceability in response to tracing for the ripple-effects. We developed a software prototype called Catia to support C++ software, applied it to a case study of an embedded system and discuss the results.