Architecture-based Assessment and Planning of Change Requests

Abstract

Software architecture reflects important decisions on structure, used technology and resources. Architecture decisions influence to a large extent requirements on software quality. During software evolution change requests have to be implemented in a way that the software maintains its quality, as various potential implementations of a specific change request influence the quality properties differently. Software development processes involve various organisational and technical roles. Thus, for sound decision making it is important to understand the consequences of the decisions on the various software engineering artefacts (e.g. architecture, code, test cases, build, or deployments) when analysing the impact of a change request. However, existing approaches do not use sufficient architecture descriptions or are limited to software development without taking management tasks into account. In this paper, we present the tool-supported approach Karlsruhe Architectural Maintainability Prediction (KAMP) to analyse the change propagation caused by a change request in a software system based on the architecture model. Using context information annotated on the architecture KAMP enables project members to assess the effects of a change request on various technical and organisational artefacts and tasks during software life cycle. We evaluate KAMP in an empirical study, which showed that it improves scalability of analysis for information systems due to automatically generated task lists containing more complete and precise context annotations than manually created ones.