Collaborative change impact analysis for enterprise application evolution

Abstract

Change impact analysis is increasingly challenging for enterprise applications due to that applications in an enterprise portfolio usually heavily depend on each other and also grow rapidly in both of scale and complexity. Automatic impact analysis based on intra- and inter-application dependencies implies potential impact propagation directions. However, due to the variety and complexity of dependencies, determining real impacts is intelligence intensive and usually needs interventions of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) on each involved application. In this paper, to enable a more agile enterprise application evolution, we propose and implement a collaborative change impact analysis approach which effectively coordinates involvements and incorporates insights of relevant SMEs. In the approach, we first construct an initial collaborative change impact analysis roadmap based on application dependencies. Then, we iteratively invite and coordinate relevant SMEs based on the roadmap, and then leverage their insights to dynamically refine the roadmap. The evaluations on real enterprise applications show the effectiveness of our proposed approach.