Model traceability

Abstract

Traceability relationships help stakeholders understand the many associations and dependencies that exist among software artifacts created during a software development project. The extent of traceability practice is viewed as a measure of system quality and process maturity and is mandated by many standards. This paper introduces model traceability, reviews the current state of the art, and highlights open problems. One issue that impedes wide adoption of traceability is the overhead incurred in manually creating and maintaining relationships. We review the latest research advancements that address this issue through the automatic discovery of trace relationships. Model-driven development provides new opportunities for establishing and using traceability information. We discuss automatic generation of trace information through transformations and the use of traceability relationships to maintain consistency and synchronize model artifacts. We conclude with a discussion of the implementation and utilization challenges that lie ahead. INTRODUCTIONModels are used in software development to manage complexity and communicate information to many stakeholders. There are models for business processes, system requirements, architecture, design, and tests. Each model has its own notation, representation, tools, and users. Thus developers, tools, artifacts, and processes are largely isolated and only weakly integrated. Interconnections are largely implicit, opening the door for inconsistencies and making it difficult to propagate change. End-toend integration can make these relationships explicit and maintain traceability information throughout.

Change impact analysis for requirements: A metamodeling approach

“…Alternatively, the used algorithms can be implemented as an extension of an industrial requirements management tool. The extension should be implemented with the following main features: (1) managing requirements and relation types given in our metamodel, (2) reasoning over requirements models (inferring new requirements relations and checking consistency of relations), (3) propagating changes based on the impact alternatives given in Table 3, and (4) checking consistency of changes based on the rules given in Table 4. Inferencing new relations and checking consistency of relations are not part of the change impact analysis but they are important to improve the accuracy of requirements relations which are the main input of our approach.…”

“…The formal semantics of the change types and their rationale can be found in Supplementary Material B. 2 The reader is also referred to [32] for the formalization.…”

“…For the complete description of the semantics, the reader is referred to Supplementary Material B. 2 …”

Tracing Program Transformations with String Origins

“…In particular, DSL compilers are often structured as a sequence of transformations, starting with an input program and eventually generating code. It is well-known that origin tracking [16] and model traceability [1,8,12,13,14] provide valuable information for debugging, error reporting and visualization.…”

“…In model-driven engineering, models are refined through transformations to produce executable artifacts. In [1], the authors argue for the need for automatic generation of trace information in such a setting. Several endeavors towards this goal have been reported in the context of different model transformation systems, such as ATL, MOF, and Epsilon.…”