  Impact analysis is concerned with the identification of consequences of
changes and is therefore an important activity for software evolution. In
modelbased software development, models are core artifacts, which are often
used to generate essential parts of a software system. Changes to a model can
thus substantially affect different artifacts of a software system. In this
paper, we propose a modelbased approach to impact analysis, in which explicit
impact rules can be specified in a domain specific language (DSL). These impact
rules define consequences of designated UML class diagram changes on software
artifacts and the need of dependent activities such as data evolution. The UML
class diagram changes are identified automatically using model differencing.
The advantage of using explicit impact rules is that they enable the
formalization of knowledge about a product. By explicitly defining this
knowledge, it is possible to create a checklist with hints about development
steps that are (potentially) necessary to manage the evolution. To validate the
feasibility of our approach, we provide results of a case study.
