Analyzing the impact of change

To determine how potential changes to artifacts can affect related artifacts, run analysis on any indexed artifact.

Engineering Insights impact analysis workflow
The information becomes richer when you gather and view it in a useful context. Analysis helps teams trace the relationships among artifacts. You can follow child work items back to the parent work item, test cases back to requirements. You can explore what artifacts are associated with a specific artifact.
Creating impact analysis profiles
Before you can perform an impact analysis on artifacts, you must create an impact analysis profile.
Creating and modifying impact analysis diagrams
You can create and modify impact analysis diagrams to find artifacts that are related to a selected focus artifact. You can then analyze each of the linked artifacts.
Creating impact analysis diagrams by using SQL
The impact analysis flow supports the relational store, and you can create impact analysis diagrams by using SQL to find artifacts that are related to a selected focus artifact. You can then analyze each of the linked artifacts.
Full traceability
Use the Full traceability traversal option to show both upstream and downstream artifacts on every node for a selected artifact. For example, you might want to find all the artifacts that are related to a focus artifact, but you do not know how the artifacts are related. Full traceability shows you all relationships for a focus artifact. Learn about the Full traceability traversal, and how it differs from the Upstream and Downstream traversal.
Impact analysis types
An impact analysis diagram can contain many artifacts of different types, such as requirements, change requests, test cases, and more. You can find the type of artifact to focus on by using the Navigation tree in the diagram. Learn the meaning of the different artifact types in the Navigation tree.
Creating impact analysis conditions
Create an impact analysis condition that is a list of artifact types or links that are included or ignored when you apply the condition to the impact analysis diagram.
Analyzing the relationships of an artifact to other artifacts
Learn how to run an analysis by choosing the focus artifact first, and then using the impact analysis profile to create an impact analysis diagram dynamically. You can analyze artifact relationships by starting out in several ways. If you created an impact analysis diagram, then you already ran an analysis from the Impact analysis diagrams screen. You can also start an analysis from the Views, and Queries > Search screen.
Learning what artifacts display in impact analysis diagrams
When you run an analysis on an artifact, an algorithm determines what artifacts to display. Learn about the impact analysis algorithm.

Parent topic: Managing engineering data in complex projects

Related concepts

Working with impact analysis diagrams