Relationship-based change propagation: A case study

Author(s):  
Marsha Chechik ◽  
Winnie Lai ◽  
Shiva Nejati ◽  
Jordi Cabot ◽  
Zinovy Diskin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
2017 ◽  
Vol 139 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
Inayat Ullah ◽  
Dunbing Tang ◽  
Qi Wang ◽  
Leilei Yin

Product family (PF) design is a widely used strategy in the industry, as it allows meeting diverse design requirements. Change propagation in any PF is difficult to predict. Consequently, while numerous design change management methodologies presently exist, their application is restricted to a single artifact. This issue is overcome in the present study. The proposed framework explores effective change propagation paths (CPPs) by considering the risks associated with design changes in the PF with the aim of minimizing the overall redesign cost. The propagated risk, which would result in rework, is quantified in terms of change impact and propagation likelihood. Moreover, a design structure matrix (DSM) based mathematical model and an algorithm for its implementation are proposed to investigate the change propagation across the PF. Finally, to demonstrate their effectiveness, a PF of electric kettles is examined in a case study. The study findings confirm that the proposed technique is appropriate for evaluating different CPPs in PF.


Author(s):  
Leilei Yin ◽  
Quan Sun ◽  
Youxiong Xu ◽  
Li Shao ◽  
Dunbing Tang

Abstract Nowadays customer demand for satisfactory product developed in limited time is rapidly posing a major challenge to product design and more distributed products are developed to address these concerns. In the distributed product design, engineering change (EC) is an inevitable phenomenon and consumes much production time. It is necessary to assess the design change effectively in advance. Some methods and tools to predict and analyze the change propagation influence have been provided. From the perspective of design change duration, our work extends the method of assessing design change by incorporating risk factors from different working groups in multiple design sites, functional maintenance during the change propagation. The primary result of this work is the provision of a design support to acquire the optimal design change scheme by estimating the duration. In this paper, risk factor of distributed design is applied to the influence evaluation of change propagation, which implies an increase of change propagation influence due to the varying levels of expertise, possible lack of communication. Besides, a deterministic simulation model is proposed to assess the change propagation schemes. The model combines the effects of design change parallelism, iteration, change propagation for the distributed product design. Based on the simulation results, a more focused discussion and identification of suitable design change schemes can be made. A case study of an assembly tooling for the reinforced frame is implemented to demonstrated how the developed method can be applied. Finally, the method is initially discussed and evaluated.


Author(s):  
Phyo Htet Hein ◽  
Varun Menon ◽  
Beshoy Morkos

Prior research performed by Morkos [1], culminated in the automated requirement change propagation prediction (ARCPP) tool which utilized natural language data in requirements to predict change propagation throughout a requirements document as a result of an initiating requirement change. Whereas the prior research proved requirements can be used to predict change propagation, the purpose of this case study is to understand why. Specifically, what parts of a requirement affect its ability to predict change propagation? This is performed by addressing two key research questions: (1) Is the requirement review depth affected by the number of relators selected to relate requirements and (2) What elements of a requirement are responsible for instigating change propagation, the physical (nouns) or functional (verbs) domain? The results of this study assist in understanding whether the physical or functional domain have a greater effect on the instigation of change propagation. The results indicated that the review depth, an indicator of the performance of the ARCPP tool, is not affected by the number of relators, but rather by the ability of relators in relating the propagating relationships. Further, nouns are found to be more contributing to predicting change propagation in requirements. Therefore, the physical domain is more effective in predicting requirement change propagation than the functional domain.


2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 291-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Prabhu Shankar ◽  
Beshoy Morkos ◽  
Joshua D. Summers
Keyword(s):  

2004 ◽  
Vol 126 (5) ◽  
pp. 788-797 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. John Clarkson ◽  
Caroline Simons ◽  
Claudia Eckert

In redesign and design for customization, products are changed. During this process a change to one part of the product will, in most cases, result in changes to other parts. The prediction of such change provides a significant challenge in the management of redesign and customization of complex products where many change propagation paths may be possible. This paper reports on an analysis of change behavior based on a case study in Westland Helicopters of rotorcraft design; the development of mathematical models to predict the risk of change propagation in terms of likelihood and impact of change; and the development of a prototype computer support tool to calculate such information for a specific product. With knowledge of likely change propagation paths and their impact on the delivery of the product, design effort can be directed towards avoiding change to “expensive” sub-systems and, where possible, allowing change where it is easier to implement while still achieving the overall changes required.


Author(s):  
Elmira Rajinia ◽  
Simon Li

When minor modifications need to be made in an object-oriented computer program, they often incur further more changes due to the presence of dependency in the codes and the program structure. Yet, to accommodate the required change, there can also be more than one option to carry out the initial modifications. To select the modification option in this context, this paper proposes a systematic approach to estimate the scope of change propagation of an object-oriented program given some initial modifications. The strategy is to first capture the dependency relationships of the entities pertaining to an object-oriented program via the matrix representation. Based on this matrix-based model, the priority number method is proposed and applied to estimate the scope of change propagation by assuming some initial modifications. The core of this method is to estimate the chance of affecting other program entities due to some modified entities. A case study is conducted throughout the paper to illustrate and justify the proposed method.


Author(s):  
HENRIQUE REBÊLO ◽  
RICARDO LIMA ◽  
UIRÁ KULESZA ◽  
MÁRCIO RIBEIRO ◽  
YUANFANG CAI ◽  
...  

Although it is assumed that the implementation of design by contract is better modularized by means of aspect-oriented (AO) programming, there is no empirical evidence on the effectiveness of AO for modularizing non-trivial design by contract code in realistic development scenarios. This paper reports a quantitative and qualitative case study that evolves a real-life application to assess various facets of the adequacy of aspects for modularizing the design by contract concern. Our evaluation focused upon a number of system changes that are typically performed during software maintenance tasks. The study was driven by an analysis of fundamental modularity attributes, such as separation of concerns, coupling, conciseness, and change propagation. We have found that AO techniques improved separation of concerns and the design stability between the design by contract code and base application code throughout the development scenarios. However, contradicting the general intuition, the AO versions of the system did not present significant gains regarding four classical size metrics we employed.


Author(s):  
Beshoy Morkos ◽  
Joshua D. Summers

This paper presents an industry case study investigating change propagation due to requirement changes. This paper makes use of a change propagation prediction tool, ΔDSM, to identify if the propagated changes could have been identified and predicted. The study used an automation firm’s client project as the study subject. The project entailed 160 requirements, changing over the span of 15 month. Engineering change notifications were developed for each change and documented under the firm’s data management system. This study makes use of the change notifications to identify if any of the change were as a result of a previous change. The findings of this paper indicated the changes that occurred could have been predicted as the ΔDSM was able to predict affected requirements. This was identified by finding subsequent requirements in the engineering change notification documentation that the ΔDSM indicated might change.


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