Applying Dynamic Change Impact Analysis in Component-based Architecture Design

Change impact analysis plays an important role in maintenance and evolution of component-based software architecture. Viewing component replacement as a change to composition-based software architecture, this paper proposes a component interaction trace based approach to support dynamic change impact analysis at software architecture level. Given an architectural change, our approach determines the architecture elements causing the change and impacted by the change. Firstly, component-based software architecture and component interaction trace are defined. An algorithm for generating component interaction trace from static structure model of software architecture and UML sequence diagram is provided. Secondly, the taxonomy of changes on composition-based software architecture is presented, according to which a set of impact rules are suggested to determine the transfer of the changes in component and among components. Thirdly, by performing slicing on component interaction traces according to impact rules, the impact analysis results are obtained. Finally, the architecture design of SOCIAT, a tool supporting our approach, is developed and explained