Impact analysis and change propagation in service-oriented enterprises: A systematic review
The adoption of Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) and Business Process Management (BPM) is fairly recent. The major concern is now shifting towards the maintenance and evolution of service-based business information systems. Moreover, these systems are highly dynamic and frequent changes are anticipated across multiple levels of abstraction. Impact analysis and change propagation are identified as potential research areas in this regard. The aim of this study is to systematically review extant research on impact analysis and propagation in the BPM and SOA domains. Identifying, categorizing and synthesizing relevant solutions are the main study objectives. Through careful review and screening, we identified 60 studies relevant to 4 research questions. Two classification schemes served to comprehend and analyze the anatomy of existing solutions. BPM is considered at the business level for business operations and processes, while SOA is considered at the service level as deployment architecture. We focused on both horizontal and vertical impacts of changes across multiple abstraction layers. Impact analysis solutions were mainly divided into dependency analysis, traceability analysis and history mining. Dependency analysis is the most frequently adopted technique followed by traceability analysis. Further categorization of dependency analysis indicates that graph-based techniques are extensively used, followed by formal dependency modeling. While considering hierarchical coverage, inter-process and inter-service change analyses have received considerable attention from the research community, whereas bottom-up analysis has been the most neglected research area. The majority of change propagation solutions are top-down and semi-automated. This study concludes with new insight suggestions for future research. Although, the evolution of service-based systems is becoming of grave concern, existing solutions in this field are less mature. Studies on hierarchical change impact are scarce. Complex relationships of services with business processes and semantic dependencies are poorly understood and require more attention from the research community.
change propagation soa bpm dependency analysis web service cia semantic annotation msr soc systematic literature review (slr)