Criterion 4

Change impact and alternatives

Ratings 2026-10

Maintained relationships, constraints and version baselines identify affected requirements, designs, code and tests, and support evaluating alternatives against the same requirements. The assessment records trade-offs, assumptions and unanswered questions.

Coverage levels

1. Level 1 Linked impact input or constrained design planning exists, but impact and alternatives are not integrated.
2. Level 2 Scoped impact and constrained alternatives are both documented; affected tests or baseline-linked completeness remains incomplete.
3. Level 3 Maintained relationships and baselines support affected requirements/design/code/tests and recorded alternatives, constraints and trade-offs.

Product ratings

• GitHub Copilot coding agent ?

  Task planning and code review do not establish analysis of changes or alternatives from maintained cross-layer constraints and baselines.

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• Azure DevOps + Copilot

  Cross-service views expose associated work items, code changes, builds and test results.

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• Atlassian suite (Confluence, Jira, Rovo Dev) ?

  The reviewed sources do not establish change/alternative assessment grounded in maintained requirement–design–code–test relationships and version baselines.

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• AWS Kiro ?

  Requirements analysis checks inconsistencies, ambiguities and gaps before design.

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• GitHub Spec Kit

  Specs and plans ground implementation and review.

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• OpenSpec

  The invoked proposal inventories affected/new/modified capabilities and code/API/dependency impact.

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• BMAD Method + Test Architect

  Invoked replanning identifies affected tickets and stale entries, re-slices work and records decisions.

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• Tessl ?

  The reviewed sources do not establish impact/alternative analysis grounded in maintained cross-layer relationships, constraints and baselines.

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• Jama Connect

  Invoked impact analysis follows maintained upstream/downstream relationships and degrees of separation.

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• Siemens Polarion

  Traceability views, typed relationships and versioned Collections expose affected scope and baselines.

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• Factory.ai (Droid + QA) ?

  Diff-scoped QA and agent planning do not establish an assessment model spanning requirements, design, code and tests with alternatives and trade-offs.

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