Impact analysis in the software change process: a year 2000 perspective

Software change impact analysis has gained considerable attention with recent challenges of the Year 2000 Date situation. As the software community recognizes the growing need to identify consequences of these changes, impact analysis is making its way into the software process. Dependencies between software life cycle objects are becoming more numerous and complex as many software systems grow beyond a million of lines of code. Software change efforts are plagued with widely varying estimates for implementing software changes, since the impacts of the change are not readily known in advance. The introduction of software change impact analysis into the software process adds more fidelity to software change visibility, enabling more accurate software change estimates. The paper examines where impact analysis is applied during software changes and describes how impact analysis can be addressed in the software process.