Change Impact Analysis of Feature Models

Changeability is a fundamental property of software systems. Every software system must evolve at all levels of abstraction (models, architecture, source code, documentation, etc.) to meet changing user and context requirements. To assess the extent of a change, change impact analysis must be performed. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy of change aspects in feature modelling domain, and analyse changeability of feature models, a high level representation of system’s external user-visible characteristics. We propose the change impact model based on a feature dependency matrix to assess validity of feature change, to follow feature change propagation and to estimate changeability of a feature model using a Jaccard distance measure. The model is implemented using Prolog logic rules. A case study is presented.