Change impact analysis with a goal‐driven traceability‐based approach

Recently, the growing popularity of requirements engineering attracts an increasing attention on requirements traceability and change impact analysis, which also imposes a great demand for a systematic approach in developing software systems to handling traceability relations and requirements changes in an automatic manner. In this work, a goal‐driven requirements traceability approach is proposed to develop and manage requirements changes along three dimensions: (1) to develop software and manage requirements based on the goal‐driven use case (GDUC) approach, (2) to establish and maintain the traceability relation with a design structure matrix (DSM) to derive the traceability tree, and (3) to analyze requirements change impacts through the partitioning of DSM into blocks to serve as a basis for calculating use case points. The proposed approach is illustrated by a benchmark problem domain of a meeting scheduler system. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.