Software impact analysis in a virtual environment

With the relentless growth in software, automated support for visualizing and navigating software artifacts is no longer a luxury. As packaged software components and middleware occupy more and more of the software landscape, interoperability relationships point to increasingly relevant software change impacts. Packaged software now represents over thirty-two percent of the software portfolio in most organizations benchmark (Rubin, 2001). While traceability and dependency analysis has effectively supported impact analysis in the past, they fall short today as their webs of dependency information extend beyond most software engineers ability to comprehend them. This paper describes research for extending current software change impact analysis to incorporate software architecture dependency relationships. We discuss how we address the extensive dependency information involved, extending impact analysis using software visualization, and outline our approach to employing the software impact analysis virtual environment.