Change Impact Analyzer

A set of tools to facilitate the execution of a Change Impact Analysis in a complex, multi-layered application

What is "Change Impact Analysis" ?

Change Impact Analysis tries to determine which parts of a system are impacted by a given code changes.

cit.: Wikipedia: 'Change impact analysis' or 'impact analysis' is the analysis of changes within a deployed product or application and their potential consequences.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_impact_analysis

Premise and project status

This project is still in a very early development stage. Many functionalities are missing, and will be added in the near future

What does this project contain ?

This project contains an extendable, pluggable WPF application usable to:

1. Load a user-defined "architecture descriptor", a JSON file that describes how the target application is structured in terms of:
   • Layers and components
   • Git-based local repositories of code
2. Automatically discover and generate a diagram that represents the architecture of the application, including the relationships between its modules/components.
3. Automatically analize a selected set of Git commits, and determine how such commits impact on the overall architectural diagram

How does the Change Impact Analyzer work ?

1. The user create a "architecture descriptor" that describe how the target application is structured
2. Using the "architecture descriptor", the Change Impact Analyzer loads all the declared .sln files
3. For every referenced .csproj, the application recursively discover its
   • .csproj dependencies
   • NuGet dependencies
4. The step (2) is repeated for every dependency, until a full dependencies graph is generated
5. The user is asked to select (or declare into the "architecture descriptor") a set of Git-commits
6. The Change Impact Analyzer scan all the commits (using the git log command) and determine which files has been modified/created
7. For every modified/created file, the corresponding .csproj file is marked as "changed"
8. The detected changes are propagated into the dependencies graph, so that the user can clearly see which parts of the system has been impacted

---

The dependencies graph is shown just after the analysis is completed, and the detected impacts are highlighted in red

The detected impacts are also listed into an appropriate report tab

Supported technologies

At the current state of development, the "Change Impact Analysis" application is able to explore and discover the dependencies of

• .NET SDK-style projects (.csproj) and Visual Studio solutions (.sln)
• NuGet packages