Assessing the impact of changes at the architectural level: a case study on graphical debuggers

Understanding the high level structure of a software system is useful for determining the impact of proposed changes. We investigate techniques for recovering the high level structure, or software architecture, for cases in which no trusted architectural description exists. We then demonstrate how a scenario based approach to architectural evaluation can be used to document the impact of proposed changes on a software system. Architectural recovery and impact analysis are demonstrated using a case study comparing two graphical debuggers, xdbx and ups.

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