Using DSL-internal traceability links to facilitate change impact analysis

Abstract

While Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are a widely used technology, especially in safety-critical industries, for modelling an architecture the links created between elements in these languages are mostly investigated manually during change impact analysis which is a tedious and error-prone task. Our thesis therefore approached this issue by providing a proof of concept on how to include these DSL-internal links with traceability. Furthermore, our thesis provides a set of identified metrics that can be used in order to show the effectiveness of a change impact analysis and thus provide a way for comparing different change impact approaches. In a last step we show how the inclusion of DSL-internal links affects a change impact analysis result.