The development of software products consumes a lot of time and resources. On the other hand, these development costs are lower than maintenance costs, which represent a major concern, specially, for systems designed with recent technologies. Systems modification should be taken rigorously, and change effects must be considered. The need to offer tools allowing on the one hand, to explain the mechanisms of changes at the source code level, and on the other hand, to reduce the effort as well as the cost of maintenance, is affirmed more and more.
We propose in this article an approach based on dependence graph to identify change impact of object-oriented systems. The analysis of change ripple effect is made on the dependence graph representing the considered system. The identification at graph level of maximum range of change ripple effect will enable us to know consequences change at code source of system. This knowledge will enable us to estimate the change cost and to make a compromise between the various suggested changes. Finally, to concretize this study we produced a tool and tested our approach on certain systems.