Assessing the impact of changes at the architectural level: a case study on graphical debuggers

Author

McCrickard, D. Scott ; Abowd, Gregory D.

Author_Institution

Coll. of Comput., Georgia Inst. of Technol., Atlanta, GA, USA

fYear

1996

fDate

4-8 Nov 1996

Firstpage

59

Lastpage

67

Abstract

Understanding the high level structure of a software system is useful for determining the impact of proposed changes. We investigate techniques for recovering the high level structure, or software architecture, for cases in which no trusted architectural description exists. We then demonstrate how a scenario based approach to architectural evaluation can be used to document the impact of proposed changes on a software system. Architectural recovery and impact analysis are demonstrated using a case study comparing two graphical debuggers, xdbx and ups

Keywords

management of change; program debugging; software maintenance; visual programming; architectural description; architectural evaluation; architectural level; architectural recovery; case study; change impact assessment; graphical debuggers; high level structure; impact analysis; scenario based approach; software architecture; ups; xdbx; Software maintenance;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Software Maintenance 1996, Proceedings., International Conference on

Conference_Location

Monterey, CA

ISSN

1063-6773

Print_ISBN

0-8186-7677-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICSM.1996.564989

Filename

564989