Impact analysis and change management for avionics software

We have developed a prototype software impact analyzer that supports the maintenance of avionics software. The prototype helps maintain the complexity of software over time, decrease the learning curve for new maintainers, and control the increasing test and maintenance burden. It achieves this by providing hyperlinked views of software structure that increase software understanding, indicating the potential effects of software modifications, indicating components that need to be regression tested, and measuring the complexity of the software as it is modified. A version of the prototype that analyzes software written in Ada is currently being tested and evaluated. A version supporting JOVIAL (J73) code is under development.