Change Impact Analysis: An Earthquake Metaphor

Abstract

Impact analysis is crucial to make decisions among different alternative implementations and to anticipate future maintenance tasks. Several approaches were proposed to identify software artefacts being affected by a change. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of these approaches have been used to study the scope of changes in a program. Yet, this information would help developers assess their change efforts and perform more adequate changes. Thus, we present a metaphor inspired by seismology and propose a mapping between the concepts of seismology and software evolution. We show the applicability and usefulness of our metaphor using Rhino and Xerces-J.