Diagram change types taxonomy based on analysis and design models in UML

Abstract

Software requirements change usually occurs in every phase of software development life cycle. The approved changes will often affect to other parts of software or related artifacts. How to identify which parts are affected by such changes is a challenge issue especially in a large scale software development composed of various kinds of artifacts. Change Impact Analysis (CIA) principle are basically based on change types classification and component behavior analysis according to propagation of the impact, which is known as the impact rules. They were used to predict the potential impacts of the changes. However, most research related to change impact analysis focused on the change had effect on source code. This paper proposes a taxonomy of the change types classification that occurs with the analysis and design of software artifacts based on Unified Modeling Language (UML), including use case diagram, class diagram and sequence diagram. The application of our proposed taxonomy is also presented.