Impact analysis of maintenance tasks for a distributed object-oriented system

The work described in this paper is part of an ongoing project to improve the maintenance process in a Vienna Software-House. A repository has been constructed on the basis of a relational database and populated with metadata on a wide variety of software artifacts at each semantic level of development-concept, code and test. Now the repository is being used to perform impact analysis and cost estimation of change requests prior to implementing them. For this, hypertext techniques and ripple effects are used to identify all interdependencies. A tool has been constructed to navigate through the repository, select the impacted entities and pick up their size, complexity and quality metrics for effort estimation