Fine-grained change impact analysis for component-based product families

Developing software product-lines based on a set of shared components is a proven tactic to enhance reuse, quality, and time to market in producing a portfolio of products. Large-scale product families face rapidly increasing maintenance challenges as their evolution can happen both as a result of collective domain engineering activities, and as a result of product-specific developments. To make informed decisions about prospective modifications, developers need to estimate what other sections of the system will be affected and need attention, which is known as change impact analysis. This paper contributes a method to carry out change impact analysis in a component-based product family, based on system-wide information flow analysis. We use static program slicing as the underlying analysis technique, and use model-driven engineering (MDE) techniques to propagate the ripple effects from a source code modification into all members of the product family. In addition, our approach ranks results based on an approximation of the scale of their impact. We have implemented our approach in a prototype tool, called Richter, which was evaluated on a real-world product family.