Managing change in COTS-based systems

Traditional software engineering change management approaches are inadequate for addressing the unique challenges presented by the component-based systems. Current change management techniques view the system under development as a collection of mutable subcomponents, known to the developer and whose interrelationships and development histories are described in a change management system. This contrasts with a component-based view of a system comprising potentially many interconnected, immutable, black-box components. This contrast represents the fundamentally different change management tasks associated with component-based development. We propose a novel architecture-centric approach that combines a process model with a dedicated ADL to provide a framework for change impact analysis.