Model-driven impact analysis of software product lines

Software assets, which are developed and maintained at various stages, have different abstraction levels. The structural mismatch of the abstraction levels makes it difficult for developers to understand the consequences of changes. Furthermore, assessing change impact is even more challenging in software product lines because core assets are interrelated to support domain and application engineering. Modeldriven engineering helps software engineers in many ways by lifting the abstraction level of software development. The higher level of abstraction provided by models can serve as a backbone to analyze and design core assets and architectures for software product lines. This chapter introduces modeldriven impact analysis that is based on the synergy of three separate techniques: (1) domain-specific modeling, (2) constraint-based analysis, and (3) software testing. The techniques are used to establish traceability relations between software artifacts, assess the tradeoff of design alternatives quantitatively, and conduct change impact analysis.