Finally, another post about my work! This is a paper for my Seminar Paper course. The result has not come out yet, but I hope it is good. I dont think i can upload the document, so if reader needs to read it completely (though im not sure there will ever be ^_^), you can send me comment. Thank you!
Title : Efficient Impact Analysis on Large Software Architectural Models
Abstract. Software always grows in size and complexity and changes inevitably during development to fulfill the requirements. It should be managed in order to adapt with changes and avoid overwhelming rework and delivery delays. Impact analysis on architectural models is one approach to help engineers managing software change. There are many challenges in applying impact analysis, especially on large architectural models. This paper discusses large software architectural models impact analysis in order to analyze challenges in applying impact analysis efficiently on large software architectural models.
Keywords: software change, impact analysis, architectural model
Introduction. Analysis and design is one phase in software development life cycle with a key purpose to provide an architectural representation of system requirements and specification from earlier phase [1]. The process yields software architecture which describes the decisions about software design, data structure and the behaviors between its components [2]. Modeling the software architecture is an approach that provides engineers an easy way to understand the software, analyze, and do estimation and prediction. It gives abstraction and representation of software architecture in a defined and understandable language which helps to ensure the same understanding to different viewers about the system description and specification to reduce the risk of ambiguities and misperception [3].
As requirements get more complicated and technologies also develop and upgrade, software evolves by the time. The size and complexity of software increases and naturally the architectural models also become larger and more complex. Change during software development raises a need to carry out change management, especially in large software architectural models to reduce the risk of overwhelming rework and delivery delays [4].
Impact analysis is an approach to achieve effective change management that focuses on identifying potential affected or modified elements in order to accomplish the change requirement. In software engineering, this approach is basically applicable to any software artifacts [5]. However, performing impact analysis on software architectural models gives engineers more flexibility and less complexity on analyzing the effect of changes at architecture level [6]. Impact analysis on larger software architectural models requires more attention. Although it is principally the same, engineers face more challenges in larger models as they have naturally bigger size and complexity. This paper aims to analyze challenges in applying efficient impact analysis on models, particularly on large software architectural models.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes about software architectural model, by explaining the definition and challenges in building large software architectural models. Section 3 describes about impact analysis on models, by discussing the definition and its activities, basic challenges, and classification of the techniques. Based on theories and description from previous sections, Section 4 discusses about aspects to consider in achieving efficient impact analysis on large software architectural models. Section 5 gives the conclusion of the paper.
