Supporting impact analysis and change propagation in User Requirements Notation (URN) models

Evolving customer needs is one of the driving factors in software development. Since, requirements models are the initial available artifacts in the software development life-cycle, they go through many modifications that are necessary to accommodate changing user requirements, evolving business goals and objectives or even induced by changes in implementation technologies. Hence, there is a need to analyze the impact of requirements changes in order to help detect and solve possible conflicts between stakeholders and to assess the different design alternatives influenced by these changes. Localizing the impact of changes is one of the most efficient strategies for a successful evolution. Change Impact Analysis (CIA) aims at finding the potential consequences of a change, and identifying what needs to be modified to implement a change. Hence, change impact analysis is required for constantly evolving systems to support the comprehension, implementation, and evolution of changes. Change impact analysis has been applied to analyze source code, formal models (architectural and requirements models), or other artifacts (e.g., documents, data sources, configuration files). In this project, we are interested in developing and applying Change Impact Analysis (CIA) techniques to the ITU-T standard User Requirements Notation (URN). The development of efficient CIA algorithms for the URN language, would help software engineers understand the impact of a change prior to performing a maintenance task, hence, increasing their productivity and reducing the cost of typical maintenance tasks.