Software change is a fundamental ingredient of software maintenance.Changes made to software will inevitably cause some unpredicted and undesirable effects to other parts of the software.Software change impact analysis (CIA) is a technique for identifying the potential consequences of a change.It is found that CIA is very helpful in many aspects

including software maintenance

regression testing

etc.This paper attempts to give a survey of CIA techniques in recent years

and aims at providing references for developers to choose suitable CIA techniques.In this paper

we first introduce five classification approaches for CIA techniques.Then

we discuss some future challenges and directions for CIA in its fundamental theories

tools

evaluation

scalability

traceability

etc.