Limiting the scope of an impact analysis

When you create an impact analysis, you can specify one or more applications that limit the scope of impact analysis results.

Limiting the scope of an impact analysis has the benefit of focusing the results of an impact analysis on just the assets that are of interest to you. You limit the scope of an impact analysis by choosing one or more applications. The results of an impact analysis with a limited scope are divided into two groups:

In-scope assets belong to the application(s) specified as the scope.
Out-of-scope assets are just outside the scope of the analysis. Rational® Asset Analyzer shows out-of-scope assets so that you can see what other assets are impacted by a change to the original starting-point asset, but it does not tell you what other assets might be affected by a change to the out-of-scope assets. Showing out-of-scope assets helps you more completely understand the impact of a change when an impact analysis has a scope.

When you create an impact analysis with unlimited scope (no application designated as the scope) the results include the starting points of the impact analysis and the other impacted assets. In this case, there are no out-of-scope assets.

When you limit the scope of an impact analysis, the assets analyzed include the application that sets the scope, its child applications, and the files, containers, and transactions that are included in them. These assets are explicitly included in the application. These explicit assets might in turn contain other assets. One of the containers in the application, a file system directory, for example, might contain other files. These other files are implicitly included in the application. The in-scope assets for an impact analysis include the starting points of the impact analysis and the impacted assets that are included either explicitly or implicitly in the application. Its out-of-scope assets include any impacted assets that are encountered during analysis that are not explicitly or implicitly included in the application. Impact analysis is confined to in-scope assets and does not go beyond any out-of-scope assets that are encountered during its processing. In other words, impact analysis records an asset as impacted but out-of-scope but does not perform any additional tracing for the impacted-but-out-of-scope asset.

The inventory contains the following assets:

ApplA has child ApplB.
ApplB includes the file for ProgramY.
DE-X is used in a call to EntryPointQ in ProgramZ which is in ApplC and DE-X is also used in a call to EntryPointR in ProgramZZ, which is not in any application.

Given these assets, the following impact analyses return the following results:

Table 1. Effect of scoping applications on impact analysis results
Starting point	Scope	In-scope assets	Out-of-scope assets
DE-X in ProgramY	ApplA	DE-X, ProgramY, ApplA, ApplB	EntryPointQ, EntryPointR, ProgramZ, ProgramZZ, ApplC
DE-X in ProgramY	ApplB	DE-X, ProgramY, ApplB, ApplA	EntryPointQ, EntryPointR, ProgramZ, ProgramZZ, ApplC
DE-X in ProgramY	ApplC	DE-X	EntryPointQ, EntryPointR, ProgramY, ProgramZ, ProgramZZ, ApplA, ApplB, ApplC

The "Impact analysis details" page reports in-scope assets on the Overview, Summary, and Details tabs. It reports out-of-scope assets on the Out-of-scope assets tab.