A knowledge-based system for change impact analysis on software architecture

This paper deals with the change impact analysis for software architectures evolution. Some approaches have been proposed for integrating the evolution issue at the architectural level. However, none of these studies the impact assessment between the software architecture and its related source code. To deal with that, we propose a model, called ASCM (Architectural Software Components Model), on which we define our change propagation process. Our model describes the common elements defined in an architecture description, independently of architecture description languages (ADLs). The change propagation process is based on a knowledge-based system, in which the model instances are stored. When a modification is applied on these, propagation rules are fired to simulate the impact on software architecture and on its source code. This is done using a platform developed on the top of Eclipse Environment.