JOURNAL OF INFORMATION SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING 25, 363-373 (2009) 363 Short Paper_________________________________________________ Experienced Report on Assessing and Evaluating Change Impact Analysis Through a Framework and Associated Models OBETEN O. EKABUA AND MATTHEW O. ADIGUN Centre of Excellence for Mobile e-Services for Development Department of Computer Science University of Zululand KwaDlangezwa, 3886 South Africa In our evolving computing environment with heterogenously distributed informa- tion systems, products are continuously modified and changed. During this process a change to one part will, in most cases, results in changes to other parts. Therefore, in de- sign and redesign for customization, predicting this change presents a significant chal- lenge. Changes are required to fix faults or to improve or update products. This paper reports on the development of a change impact analysis factor adaptation model, a fault and failure assumption model and the implementation of a generic change propagation framework for evaluating and assessing utility service provisioning in a Grid service en- vironment. While implementing the framework, data was collected for a period of 3 years which helped in predicting an immediate year. The obtained results from our pre- diction shows the framework, its associated models and Bayesian statistics as satisfying the cri- teria for a significant prediction accuracy in evaluating and assessing the effect of a change of service in a grid environment when compared to an unreported regression method. Keywords: change impact analysis, service provisioning, software metrics, service main- tenance, Bayesian statistics, grid environment 1. INTRODUCTION A promising approach for developing dynamic and heterogenous service provision- ing environments has emerged, through the combination of distributed object computing, component based computing and web-based concepts into what is now known as Service Oriented Architectures. This technology evolution, combined with web revolution, poses new challenges in the context of service provisioning. With the massive diffusion of the internet as a distributed environment for service provisioning, people’s interaction with computers has dramatically changed. People relate not to their own computer but rather to their point of presence within the service provisioning environment [1-3]. Computing systems’ evolution (hardware and software) can be traced to changes in the original requirements, different hardware platform adoption and efficiency improve- Received March 12, 2008; accepted October 24, 2008. Communicated by Chi-Sheng Shih.