Enterprise Information Maps, Impact Analysis, DBC and Eiffel

I got some time again after months to revisit my blog. And i think now is the time when i can put a lot of thoughts and actions here. The last few months has been hectic to say the least, and the future professes to be more. Well i have been working on quiet a few initiatives and a few have started taking shape. My recent energies have been dedicated to quiet a few things , a few which i will discuss here. Over the past few months i have been working on Enterprise Information maps and Change Impact analysis using Information retrieval. In addition there are quiet a few things which i have been looking at. Design by contract was one aspect which i had always been interested in. As a consequence, i studied Eiffel to study how it applies. Been a keen java programmer, i also looked at iContract, a tool which allows adding constructs to java for specifying DBC assertions. iContract is a preprocessor for java, it decorates java files with DBC assertions.
I also revisited shell scripting.
Well moving on to more serious stuff, personal initiatives have revolved around EIS(Enterprise Information Maps) and Change Impact analysis using Information retrieval.

Enterprises today have large amounts of data pertaining to various departments within the organization. However making sense of this plethora of data has been and continues to be a mammoth task. Most measurements are empirical to say the least. Business Intelligence tools go to a small extent to provide some semblance of clarity related to this data. The need of the hour is to provide a way to accumulate data from different sources and provide a tool which provides answers to the basic questions at different levels in the enterprise. My current initiative is to create a product that can answer these basic queries and at the same time shielding the low level technical intricacies from users. Work on this has progressed to a fair extent but it will still take time to carry it to completion.

Impact Analysis Using Information Retrieval

Background : Traditionally impact analysis methods focus on achieving impact analysis using one of the following ways

1) Traceability Analysis

2) Dependency Analysis

3) Judgment based on Experience

4) Code inspection

My approach is to employ existing systems used commonly in projects and employ information retrieval for performing change impact analysis. Currently i am looking at the following 2 systems

1) Bug Tracking

2) Source Code Versioning System

More on this in future posts.
Cheers