Architectural Slicing to Support System Evolution

Change impact analysis is a useful technique in software maintenance and evolution. Many techniques have been proposed to support change impact analysis at the code level of software systems, but little effort has been made for change impact analysis at the architectural level. In this chapter, we present an approach to supporting change impact analysis at the architectural level of software systems based on the architectural slicing and chopping technique. The main feature of our approach is to assess the effect of changes in a software architecture by analyzing its formal architectural specification, and therefore, the process of change impact analysis can be automated completely. INTRODUCTION Software change is an essential operation for software evolution. The change is a process that introduces new requirements into an existing system, modifies the system if the requirements were not correctly implemented, or moves the system into a new operational environment. The mini-cycle of change during software evolution (Yau et al., 1978) is composed of several phases: request for change; planning phase, consisting of program comprehension and change impact analysis; change implementation, including restructuring for change and change propagation; verification and validation; and re-documentation. Change impact analysis (Bohner & Arnold, 1996; Lindvall & Sandahl, 1998), one of the system analysis methods, is the task through which the programmers can assess the extent of the change, that is, the software component that will impact the change, or be 701 E. Chocolate Avenue, Suite 200, Hershey PA 17033-1240, USA Tel: 717/533-8845; Fax 717/533-8661; URL-http://www.idea-group.com IDEA GROUP PUBLISHING This chapter appears in the book, Managing Corporate Information Systems Evolution and Maintenance, edited by Khaled Khan and Yan Zhang. Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.