A Framework for Advancing Change Impact Analysis in Software Development Using Graph Database

Software systems are subject to continuous change as they always grow in size and complexity. Change Impact Analysis is a critical tool in controlling changes, and its importance in software maintenance and requirements engineering has garnered it much attention in literature. The analysis process should be able to trace a change from the requirement models down to specific source code elements, and vice versa. This however proves very difficult as the sheer size of information in software systems poses a problem for storage and navigation. While many methods exist to perform change impact analysis, few have attempted it on multiple scopes of a software system even though change is not limited to a specific scope. This project aims to propose an impact analysis framework for a combined scope of system development models by means of utilizing traceability links between these models. This is made possible by using graph databases as a data store for the various models and a querying tool. Graph databases are powerful in analyzing relationships among entities, and are proven to be extremely scalable, allowing them to store all details related to software models.