An approach to analyzing the software process change impact using process slicing and simulation

When a software process is changed, a project manager needs to perform two types of change impact analysis activities: one for identifying the affected elements of a software process which is affected by the change and the other for analyzing the quantitative impact of the change on the project performance. We propose an approach to obtain the affected elements of a software process using process slicing and developing a simulation model based on the affected elements to quantitatively analyzing the change using simulation. We suggest process slicing to obtain the elements affected by the change. Process slicing identifies the affected elements of a software process using a process dependency model. The process dependency model contains activity control dependencies, artifact information dependencies, and role replacement dependencies. We also suggest transformation algorithms to automatically derive the simulation model from the process model containing the affected elements. The quantitative analysis can be performed by simulating the simulation model. In addition, we provide the tool to support our approach. We perform a case study to validate the usefulness of our approach. The result of the case study shows that our approach can reduce the effort to identify the elements affected by changes and examine alternatives for the project.(C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.