Traceability management for impact analysis

Software change impact analysis is the activity of the software maintenance process that determines possible effects of proposed software changes. This activity is necessary to be aware of ripple-effects caused by the change and record them so that nothing is overlooked. A change has not only impact on the source code, but also on the other related software artefacts, such as requirements, design, and test. For this reason, impact analysis can be efficiently supported through traceability information. In this paper we review traceability management in the context of impact analysis and discuss the main challenges and research directions.