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Impact analysis

The EA problem

Every meaningful change carries a question: if this changes, fails, or retires — what else is affected? The answer lives in the relationships between assets, and humans are bad at traversing those by memory. Miss a dependency and a "simple" decommission takes down a feed three systems away. Impact analysis is the discipline of making blast radius visible before you act.

How ArcaMira addresses it

Impact Analysis (/impact-analysis) is a what-if workspace. You pick a starting point — an application, technology, data store, or capability — from a tabbed picker, and ArcaMira computes the blast radius across the graph:

  • Affected applications — what depends on your starting point.
  • Capability coverage gaps — capabilities that would lose support if the change went ahead.
  • Initiatives in flight — planned work that already touches the affected assets.
  • Replacement candidates — alternatives already in the estate.
  • Data at risk — data feeds that would break, flagged feed_lost when the affected applications are the only producers of a feed.

The value isn't just the traversal — it's the interpretation. ArcaMira turns "these nodes are connected" into "here's what this decision costs you, and here's what's already in motion."

Recent analyses are remembered so you can return to them.

Impact analysis starts from a single asset. When you want to weigh several moves at once, use the Scenarios engine (/scenarios, next to Impact Analysis under Planning): compose a change set — retire / introduce / reconnect — and evaluate its combined second-order effects against the live graph in a safe dry-run before optionally committing it.

What good looks like

  • Before any retirement or major change, the team runs an impact analysis and reads the blast radius into the decision.
  • Capability gaps and lost data feeds are caught at planning time, not at cutover.
  • Replacement candidates and in-flight initiatives are factored in, so changes are sequenced sensibly.

Impact analysis is only as good as the relationships in your repository — the more your applications, technologies, capabilities, and data are linked, the sharper the blast radius. This is one of the strongest reasons to keep capability mapping and dependency links current.