An impact trace describes the flow of data within and between programs in an application: how data items exchange values, use each other in computations, and so forth. If you are extracting business rules, for example, you might want to view an impact trace to make sure that a segment encapsulates all of the business logic for a candidate rule. Or you might want to use a scoped trace to help locate candidates that exhibit a particular type of relationship.
You can analyze the entire tree for a trace, or a consolidated tree that displays only the ports and leaf nodes traversed in the trace. Options let you filter out unwanted relationships or variables. You can save trace results and restore them in a later session.