Characterizing Changes to Assess Architectural Impact

With today’s ever increasing demands on software, software developers must produce software that can be changed without the risk of degrading the software architecture. Degraded software architecture is problematic because it makes the system more prone to defects and increases the cost of making future changes. The effects of making changes to software can be difficult to measure. One way to address software changes is to characterize their causes and effects. A software change characterization mechanism allows characterize the effects of a change using different criteria, e.g. the cause of the change, the type of change that needs to be made, and the part of the system where the change must take place. This information then can be used to illustrate the potential impact of the change. Another benefit of characterizing the changes is that it allows engineers to develop a common approach to deal with changes that have similar characteristics, rather than addressing each change individually. This paper introduces an architecture change characterization scheme created to assist developers in measuring the impact of a software change on the architecture of the system.