Change impact analysis to support architectural evolution

Change impact analysis is a useful technique in software maintenance and evolution. Many techniques have been proposed to support change impact analysis at the code level of software systems, but little effort has been made for change impact analysis at the architectural level. In this paper, we present an approach to supporting change impact analysis at the architectural level of software systems based on an architectural slicing and chopping technique. The main feature of our approach is to assess the effect of changes in a software architecture by analyzing its formal architectural specification, and, therefore, the process of change impact analysis can be automated completely.