Wolf: Supporting impact analysis activities in distributed software development

Software development activities face several challenges when they take place in geographically distributed settings. These challenges are often related to communication, collaboration and, especially, information diffusion among team members. This is especially important in impact analysis activities where all stakeholders need to align their work to understand the impact of a change. To properly support this, it is necessary to understand the different ways in which impact analysis activities are performed. In our previous work we identified two views of impact analysis: an organizational and an individual view. The first view is important for managers to understand the impact of the changes in the activities of the team, whereas the second refers to the developers' strategies to deal with the impact of changes in their daily work. This paper discusses these views and based on them describes a tool, called Wolf, to support impact analysis activities. Our tool, based on semi-automatically generated traceability links, provides different visualizations to support communication, collaboration and information diffusion among stakeholders thereby facilitating impact analysis activities in geographically distributed settings.