Impact analysis of graph-based requirements models using PageRank algorithm

Managing requirements changes of complex systems and the potential impact of such changes represents a big issue for companies. Currently, commercial modelers propose tools for analyzing the direct impact of requirements changes on system design or code but the analysis of requirement change on other requirements remains seldom studied. This paper proposes an approach for the impact analysis of changes in requirements combined with a ranking of importance of requirements in graph based requirements network. Warshall algorithm is used in this paper for performing the impact analysis. Along with this approach, PageRank algorithm is used for ranking requirements according to their importance. Requirements hierarchy and their textual description of importance are considered as input for calculating their impact as well as their importance within the network of requirements. This combination of Warshall and PageRank algorithms provide significant results for helping designers in decision-making process of modifying requirements for future design versions.