It is well known that the usage of traceability links within the whole development process is required for effective evolutionary development. But their usage in analysis and design is still far away from being widely accepted due to lacking or missing methods and tools for their creation, update and verification. A trace represents a chain of development activities, i.e. that a traceability process has to be coupled tightly to the used development process.

Advantages

Traceability links support the estimation of effort for a change, because all affected artefacts can be found easily. Regression tests after changes are simplified, because each requirement is connected by traceability links to verifying test cases. The realization of each requirement can be proofed. Concluding, traceability improves the maintainability, comprehensibility and verifiability of software immense.

Problems

Thus, there is still the necessity to establish traceability links manually, to bridge abstraction gaps. This fact is deemed to be the fundamental weakness of traceability links and hinders its wide usage. Beside the high effort for link creations, are they only useful, if the traceability information of a software system is correct and complete.

Approach

This project aims to give support for the creation, maintenance and verification of traceability links based on the definition of a concrete process model for traceability establishment. A methodological handling of traceability is introduced and integrated into common software development processes.

Results

• State of the Art
• Basics: Traceability Categories, Link Types, Link Syntax
• Traceability Model (Semantic) for the Unified Process
• Traceability Model (Semantic) for Fusion

Involved Persons

Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Ilka Philippow
Priv.-Doz. Dr.-Ing. habil. Matthias Riebisch
Dipl.-Wirtsch.-Ing. Patrick Mäder

Publications

Patrick Maeder, Ilka Philippow and Matthias Riebisch:
Customizing Traceability Links for the Uni-fied Process. In: Proceedings International Conference on Quality of Software-Architectures (QoSA 2007), July 12–13, 2007, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. (submitted)


Patrick Maeder, Ilka Philippow and Matthias Riebisch:
A Traceability Link Model for the Unified Process. In: Proceedings 8th ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking, and Parallel/Distributed Computing (SNPD2007), July 30–August 1, 2007, Qingdao, China. International Association for Computer & Information Science, 2007, (accepted).


Patrick Maeder, Ilka Philippow and Matthias Riebisch:
Enhanced Traceability for the Unified Process. In: Proceedings International Symposium on Grand Challenges in Traceability (GCT’07), March 22-23, 2007, Lexington, Kentucky, USA. pp 134


Manuel Reis Monteiro and Patrick Maeder:
ToolNet – Domain and Tool Connector. In: Proceedings International Symposium on Grand Challenges in Traceability (GCT’07), March 22-23, 2007, Lexington, Kentucky, USA. pp 135

Patrick Maeder, Matthias Riebisch, and Ilka Philippow:
Traceability for Managing Evolutionary Change - A Roadmap. In: Proceedings 15th International Conference on Software Engineering and Data Engineering (SEDE-2006), July 6 - 8, 2006, Los Angeles, California, USA. International Society for Computers and their Applications, 2006, pp 1-8.

Patrick Mäder, Matthias Riebisch und Ilka Philippow:
Maintaining Traceability Links during Evolutionary Software Development. (In German: Aufrechterhaltung von Traceability Links während evolutionärer Softwareentwicklung.) Proceedings 8. Workshop Software-Reengineering, Bad-Honnef May 3-5, 2006. Softwaretechnik-Trends 26(3), Mai 2006


 

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