Change Impact analysis and propagation in service based business process management systems preliminary results from a systematic review

Abstract

Change Impact analysis and propagation have widely been studied in Software engineering research, but most studies are related to monolithic software applications, and very few studies have focused on distributed environments. Newer technologies like SOA, BPM and Cloud demand different perspectives and newer tools and techniques to support impact analysis and propagation in distributed environments. SOA adoption is fairly recent and major concern is now shifting towards maintenance and evolution of the service based business Process management systems. Change impact analysis and propagation have been identified as a potential research area in this context. This study is part of a larger study to systematically review all available research on impact analysis and propagation in context of Business process management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Preliminary results have been reported by answering 2 selected research Questions. 43 studies were selected out of initial set of 182 research articles. Studies answering selected research questions have been included in this report. BPM is considered at Business Level for Business operations and Process Models, while SOA is considered as a Deployment Architecture at service level. We have extended the scope of our study to Inter-Process and inter-service change analysis in addition to Top-Down, Bottom-Up analysis. This study revealed that although evolution of service based systems is getting significant attention, very few approaches and tools exist to support impact analysis and propagation activities.