An approach for estimating the time needed to perform code changes in business applications

Business applications automate various business processes within an organization. Business analysts frequently modify business processes to maintain a competitive edge. Estimating the time needed to modify a business process is not a trivial task, since changes to the business process result in changes to the source code of which the business analyst has limited knowledge. We propose a change impact metric which estimates the code to be modified as a result of a business process change. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed change impact metric through a case study, using seven large business applications from the OFBiz open source project.

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