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| Impact Analysis: |
In a nutshell...
Impact Analysis is used to identify the objects
in a system that will be affected by a proposed
change.
As an example: Suppose you wanted
to estimate the cost of changing all occurrences
of the word ‘customer’ to ‘patient’
in one of your applications. You would want to know
how many objects would be affected and this would
give you an estimate of the time time/cost required
to perform the update.
Tell me more...
In the early days of computing, software consisted
entirely of source code contained in text files.
Programmers interacted with their software through
source code editors. And every good source code
editor provided find and replace commands which
helped programmers to quickly locate and update
specific text strings.
In recent years, the shape of software has changed.
Today we have visual tools with integrated development
environments. We think of our programs as collections
of objects whose behavior is determined by information
that we key into property sheets.
Each type of object has a specialized design interface.
We have form designers, report designers, query
designers, and yes, we still have source code editors.
But the editor’s find and replace commands
typically search only source code. There are no
comparable commands for searching the hundreds of
objects and thousands of properties that make up
today’s typical project.
Impact analysis uses specialist software to inspect
other software packages and report and enumerate
all properties. Sometimes this software can be used
to actually perform all the updates for you meaning
updates can be done globally and consistently across
many databases.
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