Change Impact Analysis for Context-Aware Applications in Intelligent Environments

As software systems for context-aware applications and intelligent environments become increasingly complex and adaptive, the need to understand and predict the impact of changes grows. Such changes may manifest themselves (1) as alterations in the way users behave, (2) as software customizations to handle new requirements, and (3) as variations on the dynamic context in which intelligent environment systems are deployed and operate. Such internal and external changes may be anticipated or unforeseen in nature. With reliability being a key concern for intelligent environments, we revisit in this work the state-of-practice on change impact analysis (CIA) - a well-known methodology in software engineering - and investigate to what extent it can be applied and enhanced to contribute to the development of more reliable context-aware adaptive applications to increase the confidence in intelligent environment systems.