Mining version histories for change impact analysis in business process model repositories

•We propose a novel approach to change impact analysis in an organization's repository of business process models.•Our approach mines the revision history of a process model repository and uses this knowledge for change impact estimation.•The result of an evaluation using the version history of a real business process repository indicated the effectiveness of our approach and its outperforming a basic dependency-based impact analysis.

In order to remain competitive and sustainable in today's ever-changing business environments, organizations need to frequently make changes to their business activities and the corresponding business process models. One of the critical issues that an organization faces is change impact analysis: estimating the potential effects of changing a business process to other processes in the organization's business process repository. In this paper, we propose an approach to change impact analysis which mines a version history of a business process model repository. Our approach then identifies business process models that have been co-changed in the past and uses this knowledge to predict the impact of future changes. An empirical validation on a real business process model repository has showed the effectiveness of our approach in predicting impact of a change.