Software change impacts - An evolving perspective

As software engineering practice evolves to respond to demands for distributed applications on heterogeneous platforms, software change is increasingly influenced by middleware and components. Interoperability dependency relationships now point to more relevant impacts of software change and necessarily drive the analysis. Software changes to software systems that incorporate middleware components like web services expose these systems and the organizations they serve to unforeseen ripple effects that frequently result in failures. Current software change impact analysis models have not adequately addressed this trend. Moreover, as software systems grow in size and complexity, the dependency webs of information extend beyond most software engineers ability to comprehend them. This paper examines preliminary research for extending current software change impact analysis to incorporate interoperability dependency relationships for addressing distributed applications and explores three dimensional (3D) visualization techniques for more effective navigation of software changes.