An Ontology-Driven Visualization Tool for Software Requirements Traceability Matrix and Test Documents

Abstract

Software quality is one of the factors that affect the acceptance of software products and it is often assessed in terms of defects found in the software and whether the software can meet specified user requirements. It is hence a valuable practice within software projects to perform requirements tracing to ensure that each requirement is tied to a number of software deliverable documents and none of the requirements are left unanswered by the final software product. Requirements traceability matrix (RTM) is a tool that can help with requirements tracing as it documents the relationships between a requirement specification and other software documents such as design, source code, test, and defect documents. Since there are several deliverable documents with complex information involved, it can be difficult to find relevant documents and information. We propose a visualization tool that helps the software development team in tracking information related to the RTM. In particular, the tool supports tracing between user requirements and the documents related to testing of the software and the defects found when testing the software. We model the RTM and testing-related information, including a standard classification of software defects, as an ontology so that the tool can support semantics-based queries on the ontology. The query results are presented graphically to aid the visualization and understanding of the connection and relationships between traced information. A case of core banking software, developed by a software company in Thailand, is used as an example.