Concern tracing and change impact analysis: An exploratory study

A few AO Requirement Engineering approaches support traceability by providing mapping and influence of requirements-level concerns on subsequent phase artefacts. This is not sufficient to ensure that the architecture actually meets the specified requirements (as some requirements lead to architectural decisions, establish trade-offs, etc). Equally, without knowledge of such traceability relationships it becomes very difficult to predict change impact and thus understand the causes of system instability. In order to improve this situation, we have developed a concern-oriented dependency taxonomy that enables us to capture the dependency relationships between requirements-level concerns and their manifestation at the architectural level. We have applied the dependency taxonomy on a real-world case study to explore and identify unstable architectural components, which are most likely to be impacted by change.