Using Traceability to Support SOA Impact Analysis

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been recognized as an important paradigm for software engineering. Several organizations are in the process of adopting and evolving SOA deployments. In this paper we present IntelliTrace, an intelligent traceability framework to support impact analysis across different modeling layers of a SOA based system. The framework uses traceability links among different SOA artifacts to analyze the impact that changes in SOA-based systems can have in key performance indicators. The change impact analysis is triggered by different situations such as changes at the service level, business process level, goal level, key performance indicators, and SOA infrastructure. A prototype tool has been implemented in order to illustrate and evaluate the framework. An extensive case study built around an online airline reservation system is used to evaluate the framework.